Gary Humphries (ACT, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Despite an extended period of time for her contribution, Senator Polley did not really touch on the issue raised by Senator Cormann, namely the minister’s inability to explain how in five days the government is going to keep the promise made by the Prime Minister to fix our public hospital system. Of course, the answer that the minister could not bring himself to utter is that he can’t and they won’t, and the government has made an empty and vacuous promise which is going to leave a great many Australians disappointed.

Senator Cormann in his contribution made a very appropriate and very timely point in this debate, which is that we have a system today which responds to outcomes, which is about outcomes as far as Australians are concerned. Australians do not go into their public hospital and go to the emergency department at 10 o’clock at night and sit there until five o’clock the following morning waiting to get some ailment dealt with and say, ‘Thank goodness the federal government has pumped another $64 billion into our public hospital system. We would have been here until midday.’ They do not say that. They want to know what happened to the promise to fix the hospital system. If there was evidence available to the Australian public that there were actually improving outcomes in public hospitals around the country, there would be some basis for thinking that perhaps we had not quite fixed them but we were at least fixing them or in the process of doing that. But the evidence is to the contrary: waiting lists going up, times for elective surgery increasing. It was 34 days last year, two days longer than the previous year. Waiting times in public hospital emergency departments are going up. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders are having to wait 2½ times the rate of other Australians to get elective surgery. There is a whole list of statistics indicating that Australia is going backwards.

The reliance on the question of inputs, on what we are doing and what we are putting into the system, rather than what is coming out of the system, underlines the mistake the Labor Party is making. There is an issue about how you deliver reform in our public hospital system. You guys are relying on shovelling X billion dollars into the state hospital systems hoping it is going to solve the problem. Unfortunately, the evidence is absolutely compelling that it will make the problem worse rather than better. We have no indication that these people have any capacity to deliver better outcomes no matter how much extra money is pumped in. The consultation you are undertaking, the extra dollars you are throwing in, may not be the best way the public can see better outcomes in the system. Certainly to date they have not seen those better outcomes. Have the decency to tell the Australian people what you mean by ‘fixing the public hospital system’. Tell them what you mean by that. What can they look at as an indication that things are getting better in their public hospital system? If you cannot do that much, your promise is not worth very much. Your promise about improving the system even is not worth very much if you cannot tell us now what the benchmarks are that you are going to use to reflect the improvements that you say you are going to make to our system.

The solution to this issue is very simple: have the guts to do what you did with, for example, that promise to create a department of homeland security. It was a silly promise. You worked out after a few weeks of government that it was not going to make any sense, you had a little review and you quietly dumped the idea; no more department of homeland security. Well, next Tuesday is a good time to come clean, for Kevin Rudd to get up there in one of his media conferences and say, ‘Look, by the way, I said something 18 months or two years ago which was a little bit on the stupid side. I promised to fix our public hospital system by today. I haven’t done that. Sorry about that. We will find some other measure to work out how we are going to make things better in our public hospital system.’ And we would respect him for it. Unfortunately, the government’s response to the failure of its promise is more frightening than the fact that the promise has been broken. Its response has been simply to channel vast amounts of money into state government bureaucracies which have demonstrated a spectacular lack of ability to actually make a difference in a positive way. You are not the first government to pump extra money into our system; it has been happening for years and years. It happened under the Howard government as well. Unfortunately, the vehicle for doing that leaves a great deal to be desired.

You held the tantalising hope out to the Australian people that you might take on responsibility for Australia’s public hospitals. That appears to be part of the cruel hoax that you engaged in when making that promise. You apparently have no intention of putting that to a referendum anymore or considering that issue anymore. If I am wrong, tell me so. The fact is that you have broken your promise big-time and you should admit it. (Time expired)

Question agreed to.