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

What an extraordinary display of spin today from the Labor government. There is a very simple principle here. The Prime Minister has said, ever since Labor came into government, that they would honour all their election commitments and promises. And they have not. It is a bit unfortunate that I cannot bring some props in here—we are precluded from doing so. If I had one, it would be the size of the front of a newspaper, it would have a very big smiling picture of the Prime Minister on it, it would have a very big smiling picture of Justine Elliot on it, and the caption would be: ‘Kevin Rudd will fix our hospitals’. It does not matter how much spin the other side try to put on this, that paper, in the electorate of Richmond, promised those people in that electorate, and in all of the other electorates that it went to around the country, that Kevin Rudd would fix our hospitals. It is a simple premise.

The other thing he said was that, if there had not been an improvement in the state hospital system, he would move to take over the 750 public hospitals around the country. Neither of those two things can possibly be in dispute, because they were in writing at the time from the Prime Minister. As far as I can tell—and I do not think I am particularly stupid—they are election commitments. So, on the one hand, we have the Prime Minister saying, ‘I’m going to honour all our election commitments’; and here we have some that are about to be broken. This is not something that has come from this side of the chamber; this has come from the Labor government. It was the Labor government that said, ‘We will fix the hospitals.’ It is their promise that they have broken. It is their commitment that they are not going to honour. The improvement is simply not there.

Everybody on this side of the chamber knows that, obviously, on the other side of the chamber they do not spend enough time visiting hospitals—particularly not regional hospitals which are suffering so badly and at which there has been no improvement. And there has been no improvement. You have only got to look at places like Dubbo Hospital, where they have had to go to their local vet to borrow bandages. If that is an improvement, I am completely at a loss. Or look at Coonabarabran Hospital, where they had to stop offering their patients meat, because the local butcher simply could not be paid. Again, if that is an improvement, I am completely at a loss. It is simply wrong to say there has been any improvement. Every single person I talk to in regional communities right across the state tells me that there has been no improvement. And this is no indictment of our doctors and nurses, who do an absolutely brilliant job under the conditions they are asked to work in, in providing those services as best they possibly can for our regional people. For the health minister to come out on 25 May and say there have been ‘positive signs of improvement’ and ‘significant developments’ and ‘improved outcomes’ is bureaucratic rubbish. It is the same bureaucratic rubbish that we heard from the minister today in his answers to questions. He had simply no idea. I am not sure he was even listening to the questions, because the answers he gave bore no relation whatsoever to the questions that were asked. It was bureaucratic rubbish!

From Senator Moore, on the other side, we had more bureaucrat spin about ‘reviews’ and ‘we’re working with’. I think she actually indicated that it was her understanding that what they promised during the election campaign was to work with the states. Rubbish! Their promise was to fix the hospitals. Regardless of what other Labor senators are about to say, that is the absolute truth. They promised, very simply, two clear things. The Prime Minister said he would honour all his election commitments, and fixing our hospitals was one of them. If our hospitals are not fixed, he has broken an election promise to every single person across this country. Every single person across this country should be aware of that. They would remember that, because people talked about it at the time. They would come up and say, ‘Kevin Rudd says he is going to fix our hospitals.’ Weren’t they living in a pipedream thinking he might actually come through and do it! Because he has not. Unless he can pull a rabbit out of the hat in the next five days and fix the hospitals, he has broken an election promise. There are no two ways about it. If he thinks there has been an improvement in our hospital system then he must believe in fairies at the bottom of the garden. Every single person out in our communities knows that our hospitals have not been improved. The Prime Minister should live up to his election promise.