Concetta Fierravanti-Wells (NSW, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Ageing) Share this | Hansard source

Australians had an expectation that Mr Rudd would fix hospitals. That was his promise in 2007. Remember, ‘The buck stops with me. I have a plan to fix hospitals by 2009.’ Of course 2009 came and went. We have no plan. When the heat and the pressure really started to be put, he decided it was time that he needed to do something—a plan that is now in disarray. Despite all the hype and all the talk and all the spin without the substance, another cobbled-together plan emerged from the Prime Minister.

After 2½ years that this government had to develop a plan to ‘end the blame game’, what do we have? We were told, ‘We did not formally start this agreement until 5 February’—the formality started on 5 February—and then there was the Prime Minister at the National Press Club on 3 June with his first blueprint, the blue book. So we went from the big promises in the blue book on to the sales pitch that the government had in the green book. Then reality set in and we had the agreement and we had the red book. Of course, the reality is very different from the hype. The wheels are starting to fall off. It is very clear that ‘local’ does not mean local. The doctors on the Local Hospital Networks will not come from the local area, they will come from outside the area.

The transparency and the accountability so touted in the red book to stop the states syphoning off monies and using dollars for bureaucracy are gone; the National Funding Authority—gone, dumped even before the ink was dry. Funded? This campaign is a false, deceptive and misleading campaign of federal funding, and run locally, is just that: $29.5 million—another hypocrisy of this government. They called government advertising a cancer on democracy and here is their independent committee approving this campaign without even looking at the ads.

We have no real reform. As people said, ‘Labor’s wasted opportunity for real health.’ No real reform, business as usual with the states and, of course, the many, many specific concerns. As the AMA said:

The AMA is concerned that the funding structure agreed to in the IGA will not end the blame game, but instead merely provide different opportunities to undermine and ‘game’ the system.

So more bureaucracy—forget ending the blame game—because that is exactly what we are going to have. The public expectation of fixing the hospitals will not be met. There is no confidence that our public hospitals will be fixed; there is more of the same. One only has to look at page 6 of the Australian today—the headline says it all: ‘Reforms to health “business as usual”’—because that is what it is. The states are more entrenched than ever and this is business as usual. This is not reform. This is not what the Australian public wanted.