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

Senator Parry says he is dizzy from the spin that the government has put on this announcement from the Prime Minister. There is hardly any detail in this. We can only assume the area health boards are going to stay. What is this going to lead to? More bureaucracy? The last thing the health system in this country needs is more bureaucracy. Every dollar we spend on the bureaucracy means a dollar that is not going to primary health care, and it is primary health care where we need the dollars to go, not more bureaucracy.

There is no more money from the Prime Minister. I think it is another four years before any more money, other than what is currently going into the system, is going to be spent on our hospitals and on our health system. Isn’t that ridiculous? This is from a Prime Minister who promised to fix our hospitals, and if there is not a more glaring, obvious example of a broken promise from the Prime Minister than this then I do not know what it is. If you cannot trust Kevin Rudd, the Prime Minister, to keep his promise to fix our hospitals, how on earth can you trust him on any of his other promises? This is absolutely key to the future of this nation. This Prime Minister is all talk and no action. He is delivering absolutely nothing.

In relation to this so-called plan that the Prime Minister has put forward—guess what—I am sure people are starting to realise that for this plan to actually go ahead he needs the agreement of all the states. Let us look at what the states have said along the way. They have been up in arms. The minute this has come out they have jumped up and down and said how much they do not want to go near it, by the sound of it. So how on earth is the Prime Minister going to convince his state colleagues that this is a good idea when they so obviously are against it? If he cannot get the agreement of state colleagues, the Prime Minister then of course has to go to a referendum. What are his chances of that?