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

I move:

That the Senate take note of the answers given by ministers to questions without notice asked today.

I would particularly like to address my remarks to the answers, or perhaps the non-answers, given by Senator Ludwig to questions related to the Queensland health system and the Queensland hospital system. I suppose in one way we should be pleased that at least Senator Ludwig did not attempt to justify the scandalous mess that passes for a hospital system in Queensland at the present time. We had a comment yesterday from the Australian Medical Association Queensland president that the Queensland health system is a bureaucracy that has become very bloated, very rigid and very politicised—in fact, next to useless and harmful to the citizens of Queensland. But I was interested to note that Minister Ludwig tried to tell us that this was all going to be fixed by COAG, that there was no need to wait for the buck to stop with Prime Minister Rudd, because COAG would talk their way out of this problem.

The unfortunate position, though, is that the Business Council of Australia has come out today with a comment saying:

We need a new independent health body that can break the current impasse and seamlessly provide for patient needs, boost efficiency and drive the reforms required to meet the needs of the future.

They are, of course, talking about our health services and they point out they do not function effectively as one system. That is a quote:

… they do not function effectively as one system.

‘Australia’s health care is not fit for the job,’ Ms Katie Lahey, director of the Business Council of Australia, told us today. So much for Minister Ludwig’s suggestion that it is COAG that can fix the woes of Queensland.

The Business Council paper goes on to say:

… a key reason for the lack of reform progress is the fragmentation and blurring of accountabilities for financing and service provision across the levels of governments and between policy portfolios within governments.

This is a further quote from the report:

There is a lack of capacity for any one area to exercise leadership and no national integrated database on which to base planning decisions, or monitor the performance and effectiveness of the system.

Of course, Queenslanders did not need the Business Council of Australia to tell them how inefficient and how leaderless this system was. They only had to look as far as the waiting lists at every regional hospital in Queensland to understand the problem.

Then there is the wonderful funding question that Minister Ludwig did not quite manage to answer either. Of the $250 million in ‘new funding’ for health building that Premier Bligh announced recently during her election campaign, we now discover that $242 million is in fact federal money. It comes out of Rudd government campaign promises. There is an amusing comment—well, it would be amusing if it were not so serious—from Premier Bligh, who points out that they will be contributing $8 million towards the $250 million policy that she announced. This $8 million contribution, according to Ms Bligh, is ‘significant’. She said that she ‘deserved credit for securing federal cash with her forceful negotiations’.