Alan Eggleston (WA, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

The National Health Reform Amendment (Independent Hospital Pricing Authority) Bill 2011 is all about bureaucracy. It is another Gillard bureaucracy—more Gillard-ALP red tape. It is quite unbelievable. Yet none of us should be surprised. This government's record on health reform would leave even the healthiest of Australians dazed and confused. This bill establishes the third new bureaucracy under Labor's health reform program—the third new bureaucracy. It relies on other aspects of that so-called reform, such as local hospital networks, to manage hospitals and be funded under activity based funding. Yet in some states these local hospital networks are still to be established. The idea is for the local hospital networks to work with Medicare Locals to jointly deliver health care. But Medicare Locals are still not in existence across the entire country. There are very few of them established at all. This is possibly because their role has not been clearly defined. Even stakeholders are questioning what exactly they will do.

Then there is the price tag. They come at a cost of some $400 million, which is a lot of money, especially for a government which says it is going to put itself back into a balanced budget situation by 2014. We were told Medicare Locals would be at the forefront of the Labor government's promise to end the blame game and fix hospitals. That promise was made by Kevin Rudd almost four years ago, but the Australian people are still waiting—