Sue Boyce (Queensland, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I have brought the report of the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare titled Australia’s health 2008 with me and, as the Senate can see, it is a very weighty and detailed document. It looks in a very systematic way at Australia’s health and the performance of Australia’s health.

My focus tonight is on the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare itself. The institute is one of my favourite organisations within the government spectrum. They are extraordinarily diligent and prolific in terms of producing reports that underpin an enormous amount of the work that goes on in the state and federal spheres within the health and welfare system.

This report is an excellent one. It adds greatly to the information that we have about the performance of our health sector. As the report notes, from 1 July 2009 the health performance of Australia will be reported against a new and broader set of indicators, which are currently under development by the Council of Australian Governments. On page 13 the report notes that the information that the institute uses to compile its reports has been significantly improved over the past 15 years as a result of the National Health Information Agreement signed in 1993. It outlines the agreement and notes that the aim of the National Health Information Agreement was to improve cooperation between the states, which are of course the source of most of this data, for the development, collection and exchange of data, and to improve access to uniform health information.

The report also makes it very clear that there needs to be a stronger national approach to improving data collection, to improving the uniformity of data and to improving definitions used when collecting data. It is quite interesting to look at a number of areas within the report in terms of how much information is or is not available to the institute. I certainly commend to the government the need to involve the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare in all aspects of program and project development, where their input can assist to ensure that we get information that allows measurement between states and within states to be as good as it possibly can be.

We have heard a lot from the Rudd government about cooperative federalism. They have told us that the way Australia is governed would be improved when we had wall-to-wall Labor—certainly from their perspective, but absolutely not from mine. But the Liberal government of Mr Barnett in Western Australia has rather ruined that for them. What we have in fact is a very concerning situation that continues to go on. The end of the blame game has meant in many cases no blame and no accountability. It is organisations like the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare that are now at the forefront of ensuring that the information we get is reliable and comparable in a way that may not suit many of the state Labor governments at all.

I would like to mention briefly a couple of the comments in this report on the health system performance indicators. It is quite interesting that the federal government services—bulk-billing for GP attendance, availability of GP services—all have a favourable trend in 2006-07, but access to elective surgery, which of course is a state based responsibility, has an unfavourable trend. So we continue to have a situation where the history cannot be rewritten to indicate that the federal government—