Fiona Nash (NSW, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you, Senator Mason. I know that you indeed will agree that this is a very important issue for people right around Australia.

Let me just take my colleagues and the people of Australia back to the last election campaign. One of the issues that our now Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, was campaigning on then was the issue of health and hospitals. I do not know that there is a person around Australia who at that time was not very well aware of the current Prime Minister saying, ‘When it comes to health, the buck stops with me.’ That is what he said. He also campaigned very strongly, I note, in the North Coast seat of Richmond, where the local member, Justine Elliot, was seen on the front of the paper in a huge front-page advertisement with the then Leader of the Opposition and now Prime Minister Kevin Rudd. What did that say? It said: ‘Kevin Rudd will fix our hospitals.’ Very serious promises were made by the Prime Minister that he would fix our hospitals.

Yet what have we seen? I do not think that I have been to a community in New South Wales where the primary issue that is talked about is not health and hospitals—and the fact that those hospitals are by no means improving whatsoever. Not only are they not improving but people are saying to me that they are actually getting worse. This is in no way an indication of the job that our doctors and nurses do; I do want to take a moment to congratulate them for the incredible work they do and the long hours they put in in very, very difficult circumstances. What we have seen in New South Wales is a system that has been completely let down by the state Labor government, and the promises that the federal Labor government have made to fix it are nowhere to be seen. Let me give a couple of examples. If we go out to, say, Dubbo hospital in the centre of New South Wales, this is a hospital that has had to go to the local vet to borrow bandages. If you go a bit further north in the state you come to a hospital where, for a while—I hope it has been fixed now—they were not giving their patients meat, because the Labor government simply had not been paying the local butcher.

We have the extraordinary situation where the Minister for Health and Ageing said, on 24 May, that there were ‘positive signs’ of improvement in public hospitals. Despite continued signs of long waiting lists and hospital strains, the health minister, Ms Roxon, said there had been ‘significant developments’ in hospitals, and state governments had agreed to sign on to ‘improved outcomes’. What a load of rubbish. There has not been any improvement in our hospital system whatsoever.

The Prime Minister promised to fix our hospitals. If the best he can do is to come up with a health minister who says there are signs of improvement, and on that basis they are not going to keep the promise that they put forward at the last election, that is a very, very sad indictment of this government. This is a government that is continually saying to us on this side, ‘We are going to keep all our election promises. We are going to honour all our election promises.’