Louise Pratt (WA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

It is an indictment of the former government that they never had any ambition for our health system. Indeed, this flippant motion demonstrates their flippant regard for our health system. Health reform has been an outstanding issue in this nation for years now, but we knew it was never going to be an easy task. There has been a lot of posturing in recent days. Certainly we have had a lot of it from Colin Barnett. But recent developments do not represent failure—far from it. We have made enormous progress already on the health reform front. Yes, we are at a critical, pointy part of the state-federal negotiations on these issues and certainly there will be more tough negotiations to come. But we must persevere. The health of the people in our nation depends on it—the health of Australians.

For too long now the health system in this country has simply not been serving the health needs of Australians. The Howard government put its head in the sand on this issue and shifted the blame to the states, but we are not making the same mistake. We know and you know that the states simply do not have the long-term revenue base to juggle the growing demands being placed on our health system. We are facing up to that issue by working with the states to find a way through it.

We know that this is a challenge and that it is one we must all face up to. Those on the other side of the chamber know it too. We must face it head-on if we want to be able to make available to Australians things like new medications as they become available; if we want Australians to have the advantage of new options for surgical procedures; if we want things like good quality, cost-effective primary health care; and, most importantly of all in my view, if we want a robust preventative health strategy to help Australians take control of their own health.

This government is delivering massive reform to the health system, something the Liberals never did when they were in government. We have been moving through the reform process and delivering outcomes for some time now and you can see that we have made considerable progress. We started this work back in 2008 and the work we have done is already bearing fruit. We have been rebuilding and reprioritising our health system. It is not a small task.

So how far have we come? How far have we come since Tony Abbott ripped a billion dollars out of hospitals, since Mr Abbott capped GP training places, since he left the nation with a shortage of 6,000 nurses and since he left the states holding up our overstretched hospitals—all while the term ‘primary care’ did not even seem to be in his vocabulary? What have we done since that time? For a start, we have increased hospital funding by a massive 50 per cent. We are investing in emergency department upgrades at 37 hospitals around this country and in elective surgery improvements at over 125. We are delivering on 32 major Health and Hospitals Fund projects and 22 regional cancer centres.

We have given nurses and midwives access to Medicare and the PBS. This was vitally important because they can now exercise the full range of their professional skills. That in turn frees up GPs and specialists to concentrate their energies and their special skills on the activities and procedures that only they can perform. This is a long overdue reform, one that will help contain costs and simultaneously ensure that more people can access quality care when and where they need it. This was a reform that the previous coalition government lacked the courage or the capacity to tackle.

We got rid of Mr Abbott’s limit on the training of new GPs and we are now undertaking proper national planning for our health workforce. We are training 1,000 more nurses a year to help address the desperate shortage of nurses that was Mr Abbott’s appalling legacy to the nation from his time as Minister for Health and Ageing. By 2014 we will have doubled the number of GPs entering training—in excess of 6,000 more doctors will be trained over the next decade. It is training that includes great innovations to support rural and remote practice. We are establishing the first national workforce planning body that this country has ever had—something our health workforce desperately needs. We need this body so that we can address the disastrous shortages of skilled medical personnel that confronted this country when we came to office. We simply will not let those shortages happen again.

We have delivered 70,000 more elective surgery operations and 265,000 GP superclinic services. There are now 28 superclinics open providing early services and there are others under construction. We have seen over one million dental check-ups provided to Australia’s teenagers and we all know that Medicare local planning is well underway. This will finally underpin proper attention to primary care in this nation. We are helping Australians get medical treatment when and where they need it with after-hours GP services, GP superclinics, upgrades for existing GP practices and telehealth services.

We know we need to keep people healthier and out of hospital by providing more care closer to home. It is only through such strategies that we can contain the ballooning costs that currently face our nation on the health front. These are costs that are driven up by our ageing population and the increasing burden of chronic disease. We know that many of these diseases are preventable, but we can only address them with a full and proper plan for our nation, one that those opposite should support.

We are acting. We are investing in prevention strategies—those strategies that give us the best chance of improving the health of ordinary Australians without imposing an enormous burden on taxpayers. We say unashamedly that preventative health strategies are the ideal health strategies—the better strategies for health for all Australians; the better strategies in the long term for the wallets and purses of Australian taxpayers.

But the opposition never think about the long term; they only ever think, as this discussion demonstrates, about short-term political gain. We have had to start a new national prevention agency in the face of short-sighted attempts by those opposite to stall this historic reform. It is reform that the opposition should have embraced. It is reform aimed at putting a fence at the top of the cliff so that we do not have to put an ambulance at the bottom. If ever there were an example of the opposition opposing things for the sake of it, opposing a national preventative health agency is it.

Despite the opposition’s reluctance to get onboard with a preventative health agenda, the government have persevered, and we are already making a real difference in this area. We have put nicotine replacement on the PBS and we have invested in new, hard-hitting TV ads to further bolster our prevention efforts. We are in fact implementing the world’s strongest anti-smoking campaign, including the world first of plain packaging. And we are tackling the hardest task of all: the task of hospital reform. Yes, hospitals need extra funding, but that extra funding must come with reform; otherwise it will not be spent effectively. For us, realising the future health of Australians is at stake is a reason to do what it takes to achieve real change.