Joe Ludwig (Queensland, Australian Labor Party, Manager of Government Business in the Senate) Share this | Hansard source

I thank Senator Carol Brown for her question, and I note her particular interest in the government’s commitment to improving the health system. The Rudd government is investing more in our public hospitals than any previous Australian government. In the last two years the Rudd government has worked hard, rebuilding public hospitals after a decade of neglect by the former government and its health minister, who is today the Leader of the Opposition. Yet even while the Leader of the Opposition froze the number of GP training places when he was the relevant health minister, and was ignoring the desperate need for more nurses, the Leader of the Opposition calls that decade of neglect ‘the good old days’ for our hospitals.

Let us think back over that last decade they were in government, 2007-08. Hospital admissions grew by a million and presentations for emergency departments grew by two million. But the extreme response from the Leader of the Opposition was to rip a billion dollars out of our health system, our public hospitals, to cap GP places and to blame the states for all the problems it would cause. On this side of the Senate we take a different view to that of the Leader of the Opposition. We do believe the health system needs reform and we do not believe that the Australian public can trust the Leader of the Opposition, who placed our health system at risk and ripped a billion dollars out of our public hospitals. What this government is working towards is building a world-class health system. Some of our key achievements, so far, include the government’s record $64 billion funding agreement for health and hospitals. This agreement was a 50 per cent increase on the previous government’s funding agreement. (Time expired)