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

Just go back, Senator Polley, and see how Professor McGorry and all the other experts berated you—and continue to berate you—for your lack of attention to mental health and ageing issues in this country. Your basic problem is that you see ‘reform’ as photo opportunities in hospitals. You then put those on your My Hospital website to pump all around the country so that you can be seen as if you were doing something. In effect, you are really not doing anything. All you have to do is go into your state hospitals. Come to New South Wales and have a look at the hospitals there.

In the end, you had concerns. In the first COAG red book you set out the need for a funding authority. You needed a funding authority for transparency and accountability because you were concerned that state governments would not use the money as they should. So what did you do? You dumped your national funding authority. You have now come out with this funding pool. We do not know what this funding pool is going to be. Your department does not know. It cannot tell us what Medicare Locals are going to do. You have 5,000 people sitting in the Department of Health and Ageing and they still have not worked out what Medicare Locals are going to do or what these authorities and bureaucracies are going to do.

What is very clear from the agreement mark I and the agreement mark II is that very little will change—the states will still be in control. Despite whatever spin you try to put on this and whatever public relations manoeuvres you try, this is no actual deal and it is certainly no historic reform. You have merely revived the promise to the point where the same lines are now being delivered by Prime Minister Gillard instead of Mr Rudd.

Let me take you back to last year. There was Kevin Rudd boasting that we had agreed to the biggest reforms to the health system since the introduction of Medicare. One year on, this Prime Minister has the audacity to proclaim an agreement to reach an agreement. That is all this is: an agreement to reach an agreement—a photo opportunity so that she can say that she is doing something on health. It is all about political spin, especially when you compare it with the real reforms that not only were promised but also were delivered by the likes of Prime Minister Howard, Prime Minister Hawke and Prime Minister Keating.

Lets us try to look at this watered-down version of what she is trying to pass off as ‘reform’. It looks like Ms Gillard has again overpromised. There is an enormous amount of detail to be sorted out and contested. The government said it was going to have one-stop shops for older Australians. It cannot even deliver a simple thing like one-stop shops. It has been talking about it for three years and it still cannot deliver something that simple. How is it going to deliver by 1 July all these grand promises that it makes? The reality is—and you only have to look to the health commentators in this country to see it—that, just like mark I fell apart, mark II in my view will end up falling the same way. Mark I left so many details to be worked out and when the ink was barely dry it started to fall apart, and it started to fall apart with the National Funding Authority being dumped.

Patients all around Australia are fed up. As I said, you have only to go to a New South Wales hospital to see how bad the system is. In any case, the government is promising all of this $16.4 billion, but it is somewhere down in the never-never. By the time the government actually delivers, it will be 23 years from 2007, and that is a disgrace.