Anthony Albanese (Grayndler, Australian Labor Party, Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Prime Minister. This month every state and territory wrote to the government requesting support to ensure their hospital systems can withstand increased pressure from COVID. Is the Prime Minister confident the health and hospital system can withstand increased COVID cases? Why isn't the Prime Minister listening to the states and territories which have led Australia through this crisis?

Scott Morrison (Cook, Liberal Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The Commonwealth government specifically has supported the states and territories, especially with their COVID related health and hospital costs through a fifty-fifty funding partnership, which has resulted, from memory—and I look to the minister for health—to about $6 billion. Six billion dollars billion of additional funds have been provided to the states and territories. This is on top of the National Health Reform Agreement process, which has increased our funding to hospitals right across states and territories at multiple times, with the increases of states themselves. And, if the states had actually maintained the pace of the increase in funding from the Commonwealth in their own state budgets, then there would be even further resources available in the hospital budgets at state and territory level.

This issue has been a constant item on the agenda when I have met with the premiers and chief ministers on their hospital system readiness. It has been the subject of detailed modelling work done by both the Doherty institute and by individual states and territories in terms of drawing on their own private modelling work, which has been informing the decisions they've been making on how they manage the crisis.

I particularly pay credit to both the New South Wales and Victorian governments, who are confronting the biggest of those challenges at that scale, and how they have been responding to those issues, because they have had the biggest surge in cases and they are doing an outstanding job. I think they are doing an outstanding job.

There are other states and territories who haven't seen any of that COVID pressure. They haven't had the cases. They've tended to be the states who have been making a bit more noise, but they're yet to see the presentations and the challenges that have been faced in the New South Wales and Victorian system, and what I take from that is there is a difference between the states and territories about how they are managing their hospital systems. Our funding is at record levels and increasing at rapid rates, but, at the same time, states and territories must run their hospitals and their health systems, and they must run them well. That is what we've been working with—with the states and territories, who actually had a specific dedicated team within the Department of Health working to Professor Murphy, to ensure that we are closely monitoring the impact on the hospital and health systems.

As I said, we've been providing additional funding, particularly during the course of COVID. Overall, when you include the work we've done on vaccines, on GP respiratory clinics, the mental health increase and support that we've provided through the states and territories, we are at $30 billion in additional investments that we've put into health, into hospitals, to ensure that Australia comes through this crisis.

There won't be time for the minister for health to add to this answer, but I know this: under the policies of our government, working together with the states and territories, we have one of the lowest fatality rates in the world for COVID, we have one of the strongest economies to come through COVID and we are fast approaching the highest vaccination rates in the world. Indeed, on a first dose vaccination, we will pass the UK probably in the next— (Time expired)