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

You can’t trust them in your roofs, either—thank you, Senator Abetz. What was all that talk before the last election? I remember now—Kevin Rudd was an economic conservative, wasn’t he? How on earth can you trust them when on one hand he says he is an economic conservative and on the other hand he runs up $120 billion worth of debt? It is easy to shout the bar when you are spending somebody else’s money, and that is exactly what this Prime Minister is doing. He cannot be trusted to keep his promises. He cannot be trusted to manage money. It is an absolutely appalling indictment that he is not reeling in shame, having said to the Australian people that he would fix our hospitals and that the buck stopped with him. The buck obviously stopped right next to him and then kept on going; it certainly has not stopped anywhere near him at the moment. He has just flicked it to some kind of compromise and now he needs some kind of referendum to ask the Australian people their opinion, after he promised them that he would fix the hospitals. Goodness knows they need fixing.

In regional Australia, as I said at the outset, it is worse than it is anywhere else. In New South Wales, we had the situation recently where Dubbo hospital had to borrow bandages from the local vet to be able to provide services. We had another situation at a north-western hospital where they had to stop giving their patients meat because the state Labor government had not paid the butcher’s bill. That is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the appalling standard of our public hospital system, and it was this Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, who said he would fix it. You do not have to be a rocket scientist to see that he has not.

If there is one thing that the Prime Minister should probably take on board, it is that when you make a promise you keep it. If you are going to make a promise—especially one as big as fixing the public hospitals—you had better keep it. The people of Australia are going to come after you, Prime Minister, because of this broken promise. Now that they do not trust you on this, they are not going to trust you on anything. You are not fair dinkum; they know that. The Australian people see every broken promise and they know he is not fair dinkum. They know he is phoney. They know he will not keep his word.

Now we have legislation to change the private health insurance rebates. It is so interesting, as my good colleague Senator Fifield said earlier, that one minute it is the ETS: ‘We’ve gotta cool the globe; it’s absolutely, vitally, incredibly important!.’ When we finished last year, the minister, Penny Wong, said: ‘We’re going to bring this back straight away; it’s so important—