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

I also rise to take note of this report and to add some comments in relation to the so-called ‘health changes’. I do not call them ‘reforms’ because, quite frankly, what we are starting to see is a debacle which, as Senator Cormann indicated, began before the 2007 election and which is now effectively ending up in the rubbish bin of history. It is important to go back and have a look at this because to some extent the debacle of these health changes, which were so lauded in 2007, has become almost an embodiment of the failures of this government.

I would like to take the Senate back to 2007. There was Kevin Rudd saying, ‘Yes, we have a grand plan to fix the hospitals.’ But when push came to shove in estimates, the secretary of the department had to concede that there was no plan—there was not even anything on the back of an envelope. So much for Kevin Rudd’s grand hospital plan. The government therefore had to scramble to find something and that is when, as Senator Cormann says, they suddenly decided, ‘We shall set up a commission.’ In the true style of the Rudd era, when all else failed another inquiry was commissioned and they would say, ‘Let’s bring out another committee, another review, another inquiry and that will get the thing off the front page for the time being.’ And that is what we had.

Then Christine Bennett was given terms of reference and she went to work and produced a comprehensive report, which has become known as the Bennett report. But that meant that Kevin Rudd and Nicola Roxon were faced with actually having to make a decision. So they thought: ‘Are we going to make a decision? No, we will now review the review.’ This led to nightly scenes on television with the Prime Minister in his little white coat and Minister Roxon there as virtually a nurses’ aide. There they were, tracking around the countryside for photo opportunities. It was all about photo opportunities and where did those photos end up going? They went on the MyHealth website and the MyHospital website.

We trawled through all that at estimates and it was all revealed when, I remember, there was an article written called ‘Yes Minister meets Alice in Wonderland’. The government was very embarrassed by this article because it told the story of this journalist who was taken on in the Department of Health and Ageing and whose team was given the job, on a Friday afternoon, of organising a major launch for the Monday because his boss had been told just that day that the Prime Minister was going to make a major health announcement. It was most amusing—not amusing to the government—to see how they did business on the smell of an oily rag and on the back of an envelope.

Finally we ended up having the blue books. The blue book came out with one version of this so-called plan. Then it became a green book, but the version in the green book was different from the version in the blue book. After that, COAG was about to happen and the government really had to go out there with something—and so we got the red book. And the red book was very different again. When you go back and look, the provisions in the red book are totally different from what we originally began with. And that is when it began to unravel. We started this grand agreement at COAG in April and—