Slade Brockman (WA, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I was flicking through my email this morning and I saw the MPI for the day come up. These days we don't look at things in detail, we don't read the headers and footers first; we just flick to the body of the texts and we read them. I read:

A plan to fix Australia's hospitals, including more investment in beds, doctors and nurses; ending the Medicare freeze; and providing new MRI machines across Australia.

I thought: 'Wow! I wonder who wrote that excellent MPI. It probably came from Minister Cormann, Minister Birmingham or perhaps Minister Reynolds.' But then I glanced down and saw it came from Senator Wong. I thought, 'Goodness gracious me.' Seemingly I'm not the only one who read it incorrectly, because those opposite don't seem to have been particularly enthusiastic about their own MPI anyway.

This MPI does actually reflect what the government has been delivering: a plan to fix Australian hospitals. That's what the government's delivering. We've got record hospital investment. In fact, this government has increased the investment in the public hospital system over the period 2013-14 to 2020-21 from $13.3 billion to $23.4 billion, a 76 per cent increase. As Senator Hume very eloquently put it in her contribution, repeating something often enough does not make it true. There are no cuts here. In fact, there are very, very strong increases into the future. Under our new five-year hospital agreement, funding will increase by $30 billion from 2021 to 2024-25, an increase of 30 per cent, from $100 billion to $130 billion. This has been signed on by three Labor and three Liberal governments at the state level: Western Australia, the ACT, Northern Territory, South Australia, Tasmania and New South Wales. I repeat: the state Labor governments recognise a good thing when they see it—except, of course, Victoria, and Senator Duniam very eloquently went through some of the reasons why that wasn't the case. This funding agreement equates to millions of new hospital services each year for Australian patients in our public hospitals, and thousands of new frontline doctors and nurses. So 'a plan to fix Australia's hospitals, including more investment in beds, doctors and nurses' gets a tick from this government.

In the brief time I have left, let's go to Labor's record on the Medicare freeze. Minister Reynolds, do you remember who introduced the Medicare freeze? I think it might have been Labor. It might have been Labor in government. The indexation freeze was introduced in 2013. In fact, this coalition government has provided $1.5 billion for re-indexation. So this government gets a tick on the MPI.

Finally, on 'providing new MRI machines across Australia', access to MRI scans is important, and more than 400,000 Australians will now be able to access life-saving scans for cancer, stroke, heart disease and other medical conditions, with a $175 million investment from this government in new MRI machines. The first 10 locations have been announced: Mount Druitt Hospital in New South Wales, Northern Beaches Hospital in New South Wales, Sale Hospital in Victoria, Monash Children's Hospital in Victoria, Pindara Private Hospital in Queensland, Toowoomba Hospital in Queensland, St John of God Midland Hospital in WA, Kalgoorlie Health Campus in WA, Mount Barker hospital in South Australia and the Royal Darwin Hospital in the Northern Territory. There will be a competitive public application process for a further 20 Medicare-eligible MRIs, and we invite prospective facilities to apply for consideration. I know a number of excellent facilities in Western Australia have applied to be part of this new rollout.

So this government does have a plan. It has a plan for the hospitals. It has a plan for the MRIs. We have made a contribution to the ending of the Medicare indexation freeze. We will continue to manage the economy in such a way as to be able to fund all the essential services that Australians require.