Mathias Cormann (WA, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Health Administration) Share this | Hansard source

The Australian National Preventive Health Agency Bill 2009 is a piece of legislation that is being introduced now so that the government can look busy in the health portfolio. The reason they want to look busy in the health portfolio is so that they can make people believe that they are actually doing something. We have to remember that in the health portfolio the Rudd Labor government promised the world before the last election, and they have delivered next to nothing. They have been a great disappointment in the health portfolio. All we have had is a series of reviews followed by more reviews and followed now by reviews into those same reviews, and photo opportunities around Australia for the Prime Minister and the Minister for Health and Ageing, all with the single purpose of making it look as if the government are doing something when in fact they are doing nothing. It reminds us of an episode in Yes, Minister. Remember that episode of the hospital without patients. There were 500 bureaucrats—500 people typing away, writing reports, shuffling papers and being very busy—but no patients. Nothing was actually being done.

Before the election there were many promises made by Labor. Labor had a plan to fix public hospitals. They were going to fix public hospitals by the middle of 2009. The buck was going to stop with the Prime Minister. We were going to have a new era of cooperative federalism. The government was no longer going to prosecute this ideological crusade against people with private health insurance. Preventive health was going to be a high priority. Instead all we have had is reviews, reviews and more reviews—and the occasional lazy budget cut, usually targeted at those Australians who access their healthcare services through the private system.

One of those many reviews which the government commissioned was a review into the very important area of preventive health with the national Preventative Health Taskforce. The minister commissioned it in April 2008. For 15 months they worked very thoroughly through all the issues. They came up with a whole series of recommendations on how they thought the government should proceed in the preventative health area. The government received that report on 30 June. That is four months ago. Since then the government have been sitting on that report. They have not come out and made any response whatsoever in terms of which measures they will support and which measures they will oppose. We are none the wiser. And here we have this bill proposing to set up another layer of bureaucracy before we actually know what direction the government are intending to take in the preventive health area. We have a lot of talk and no action.

Mr Acting Deputy President, I will draw your attention to a few of the recommendations, because at the core of our concern is that we are faced with a government which has been absolutely unable to make a single hard decision in the health portfolio. They have not been able to make a single hard decision. Whenever they are faced with a difficult decision they set up another committee, they set up another review or they set up another consultation round, or they set up a propaganda tour around Australia where the Prime Minister and the Minister for Health and Ageing appear at a hospital near you for a nice little photo opportunity. They are trying to look as if they are doing something by being busy.

We on this side of the chamber are very supportive of effective preventive health measures. But we are not in favour of setting up another bureaucracy without a clear purpose. This is exactly why we will be moving a second reading amendment, which I hope will be supported by the Senate, which calls on the government to table forthwith its response to all of the recommendations of the Preventative Health Taskforce. The government has been sitting on those recommendations for the last four months. We in this Senate had to shame the government into releasing the report in the first place. It took them two months before they were prepared to release it publicly—all the while leaking it bit by bit whenever they needed instruction out there in the media. We want to know what the government are proposing to do in relation to the recommendation—for example, to make tobacco products more expensive by raising the average price of a packet of 30 cigarettes to at least $20 within three years. Is the government supporting that or is it opposed to that?