Judith Troeth (Victoria, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Two of the most important portfolios and departments in the federal government are education and health, and today we are looking at health. I feel sure that, as much as I respect Senator Brown, she could have reeled off another 10 minutes of statistics but the fact remains that none of this is being translated into better health care for the people who matter most, and they are patients who are in hospital beds and waiting in doctors’ surgeries. None of this is actually helping. The GP superclinics are going to absorb as many doctors from general practice—from family medical practices—as they are ever going to provide better systems for patients.

What has happened to mental health? We have seen little or nothing of that. In the words of the former Australian of the Year, Dr Patrick McGorry, the system itself is in a shambles. The shortage of nurses has nothing to do with government provision. The shortage of nurses is to do with the rapid ageing of the nursing workforce and the fact that state Labor governments will not provide sufficiently attractive working conditions to get other nurses into the system. And so it goes on. I am afraid that Senator Carol Brown’s statistics are no more than pie in the sky.

There are so many questions hanging over these health reforms that have now begun to collapse, and there are two that I would like to talk about today. It is true that there is disquiet about the financing changes, the centralised pricing and performance and the new geographical divisions called Medicare Locals. How many people know where these local divisions are going to be? Perhaps I could tell you that one proposal affecting my own state of Victoria is for a Medicare Local area to run from Deniliquin in New South Wales to the town of Seymour, which is one hour’s drive north of Melbourne. That is a huge area with differing human characteristics. Indeed, it puts one in mind of GroceryWatch, where the country was put into very large geographical areas and, again, all of western Victoria from Warrnambool to Mildura comprised one area where grocery prices would be advertised and compared. This is just nonsense. As I said, they are huge areas with vastly different characteristics, but it is typical of this government’s inability to recognise the needs of rural areas in particular.

Secondly, there is the lack of consultation that has taken place. While I admire Senator Moore and respect her views, her description of the then Prime Minister, Mr Rudd, and the Minister for Health and Ageing, Ms Roxon, moving from hospital to hospital at a light-like speed, and at the same time managing to fit in consultations with the hospital boards and local members, was absolute farce. I know, watching the newspapers earlier last year, on one day we would see Prime Minister Rudd and Minister Roxon in Brisbane and the next day they would be magically transported to Tasmania where, presumably, they were undertaking further consultations. Members of the government and members of the opposition know that this was as much about photo opportunities instead of real consultation with doctors and patients, who these schemes were going to affect the most. Indeed, a briefing note that was prepared last year for the New South Wales health minister, Mrs Carmel Tebbutt, quoted the federal government’s lack of consultation and pre-emptive announcements. Further than that, in later comments, the New South Wales government—again, presumably a friend of the government opposite—has quoted financial risks for states in the network agreement, risk management issues around the elective targets for surgery (and this has been quoted to me many times by Victorian doctors that these elective targets are just not possible; the AMA also had other thoughts about them), key governance issues, as well as funding and resource issues.

Where is the role for private hospitals in all of this? Surely they are able to help take some of the burden of increasing patient numbers away from government funded hospitals. Yet, apparently, they have no role in these health reforms. Not only that, both the Medicare Locals and the Local Hospital Networks, instead of the federal, state and local government funding that we have, place another sandwich layer of bureaucrats, so that we end up with five layers of bureaucracy rather than three in a health organisation that should be free-flowing and, as I said, able to service the needs of both doctors and patients—the two most important participants in this process.

These reforms in Victoria would have delivered approximately half of the number of urgent beds that are needed in Melbourne hospitals alone, let alone hospitals in the country. For instance, those people who think along Liberal lines do not want central funding such as this proposes. They want funding that is delivered locally so that it can affect people locally, so that you get the best outcome locally. That is the last thing that is going to happen with schemes like this. Indeed, the general indecision and lack of action along with the ridiculous theories that have been dreamed up have been summed up very well by Catholic Health Australia CEO, Mr Martin Laverty, who said that the uncertainty around these systems was causing system paralysis. There are very long lead times needed for health reforms and in the four years that this Labor government has had for significant health reform it has achieved virtually nothing except to further confuse the public, doctors and patients.