Anne Ruston (SA, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Health and Aged Care) Share this | Hansard source

Well, thank you very much, Minister! I can ensure you that these stakeholders have been seeking to speak to the department of health and the minister. I have to tell you that many of them are extremely disappointed at the lack of access that they have been able to have to both of those agencies, both the minister's office and the department, so I'm surprised that you would stand there and say that when clearly these people would love to have the opportunity to be able to get access to the department and access to the minister. It's something that is just not happening.

I also would say this isn't a contested space. This is not a contested space. The opposition, when in government, was very clear. There was a lot of work that went into getting this reform package together. It was not easy. There were a lot of stakeholders with different requirements, and to try and get this to where it is is a credit to the good faith with which the sector has negotiated with the previous government. It is a situation that obviously was inherited by the new government, who has been in the position to bring this legislation forward.

I am merely saying that we have framework legislation that has got no substance to it at all. This is something that has been a complete track record of this government, coming in here and expecting the Senate to vote on something when they don't know the details. It's a bit like: 'Nothing to see here. Trust us. It will all be okay on the day.' You refer to legislative instruments. There are many legislative instruments that, from what I can gather in my discussions, do not even have to come back into this place in relation to regulations that sit under many of the subordinate pieces of activity that sit under this legislation.

I think, if you'd bothered to wait for a little bit longer and had actually done the work around the cost recovery arrangements and around the funding model for those items that were no longer going to be on the list and are going to be contained in general use, if you had bothered to go and do all this consultation and then brought this piece of legislation back into this place, knowing that the sector had had the opportunity to speak, had had the opportunity to provide information more broadly to other members of this chamber, because I know there are many other members of the Senate who would have been very keen to understand what the stakeholders—the private hospitals, the suppliers, the private health insurers, the patients and the clinicians—think of the details that sit underneath these changes, it would have given us a great deal more confidence that we actually had got this right. We have got no idea whatsoever whether what sits under this is going to be acceptable to the broader sector and, most particularly, we do not know, because we have no detail, whether it is going to be something that is of overall benefit to patients and whether it's going to be something that is more broadly accepted. As an example, I ask you: can you guarantee to us, without any information here around what is included and how the funding model is going to work and the like, that there will be no changes to surgeries in hospitals because they are no longer able to afford to deliver a particular type of surgery because the funding mechanism for the bundling means that the hospital decides that they're no longer going to undertake that procedure? Can you give us the guarantee?