Simon Birmingham (SA, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for the Murray Darling Basin) Share this | Hansard source

I seek leave to move a motion in relation to the response by the acting Minister for Health and Ageing regarding community hospitals in South Australia that has just been tabled.

Leave granted.

I move:

That the Senate take note of the document.

This is a shocking issue that I brought to the attention of the Senate. I was pleased at the time that it passed the Senate without dissent and that condemnation of the decisions of the South Australian Labor government was carried, obviously with the full support of our Labor colleagues here in the Senate as well as the crossbenchers and all of my then South Australian Senate colleagues who co-sponsored this motion on my behalf.

This resolution highlighted the more than $1 million being stripped out of country hospital services in South Australia, particularly the Keith, Moonta and Ardrossan country hospitals. The federal minister wants to highlight a few things in his response, which has just been tabled in the Senate. I find the things he has chosen to highlight remarkable. Firstly, he highlights the fact that the federal government provides support for these hospitals through a range of existing things, such as 'through its funding contribution to private health insurance'. Guess what? Not only is the state Labor government stripping money out of these hospitals, but the federal Labor government and this minister want to strip funding through private health insurance out of these country hospitals. So we have strike one there.

Then the federal minister highlights the fact that the federal government has provided funding in the past to these hospitals through various infrastructure programs. Infrastruct­ure is wonderful. It is lovely to build a new ward for a hospital or provide some new facilities for the hospital. It is just not of much use if there is not the recurrent funding to keep operating the hospital—if they do not have the beds, the doctors and the nurses with which to actually service the patients. It is wonderful to have the bricks and mortar and the facilities, but the funding is being taken away.

The hospitals themselves have done their best to restructure, and the minister has highlighted that they have outlined financial plans to some degree. I hope they succeed in managing to keep their doors open but, if they do, it will not be through the help of this federal Labor government and certainly not through the help of the hapless South Australian Labor government, which is stripping $1 million plus out of these country hospitals. Indeed, it is a hapless South Australian state Labor government at present. It is a government embarking on the long, long goodbye—