Deborah O'Neill (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the final health report of the Select Committee on Health, from the 44th Parliament. It is entitled Hospital funding cuts: the perfect storm—the demolition of federal-state health relations 2014-2016. I want to take the opportunity to thank members of the committee and the secretariat in my opening remarks. I was very privileged to chair this committee, which undertook 52 hearings across the course of the last parliament. Every effort was made to get to regional and remote contexts because how health is experienced is very much dependent on the geographical area in which you live, and I believe in essence in the principle of bringing the parliament to the people and allowing the witnesses who have the opportunity to put on the record their lived experience, which is a source of powerful testimony, and it is a very important source of knowledge. I appreciate the gifts of intellect that very well prepared and highly educated participants in the space bring with their formal submissions, but having people able to speak to the committee of their lived experience is another type of evidence that I think is vital to enliven our understanding of the lived reality of Australians at this time.

Can I thank Senator Ricky Muir, former senator of the AMEP, for his deputy chairmanship from 25 June 2015. Other members of the committee were Senator Sean Edwards; Senator Jenny McAllister, who attended many of the hearings from 14 May 2015; Senator Claire Moore, who has an outstanding and long engagement with health, from 26 November; Senator Zed Seselja, who attended a couple of the sessions; and Senator John Williams as well. Can I also acknowledge former member Senator the Hon. Jan McLucas, from Queensland. Jan was a wonderful mentor for me in chairing this committee. Her depth and breadth of knowledge after her many years of service to the Australian people through the ALP here in the Senate were a fantastic asset to be able to draw on, and I wish her well in her new life outside this chamber. Substitute members who helped us make quorum include Senator Chris Ketter, Senator the Hon. Doug Cameron and Senator Dastyari, and we had a participating member, Senator Jacqui Lambie, who joined us for some of the Tasmanian hearings. To all of those senators I am very, very grateful for their participation in the hearings and their participation in helping us make quorum on those days so that witnesses who were prepared to come and give evidence were able to do so in accordance with the rules of the Senate.

I am genuinely delighted to have the opportunity to acknowledge the secretariat's wonderful contribution to enabling this committee, and their contact with the community at large in enabling them to participate in the process was just beyond reproach. They were so ably led by the secretary, Mr Stephen Palethorpe, who is a wonderful asset to this institution and serves it with great distinction. His very able principal research officer, Miss Jed Reardon, was just wonderful at every part of the journey. I also thank Mr Josh See, who did a lot of the backup work for us. Other support was offered to us by Michael Kirby, Josh Wrest, Erin Pynor, Annemieke Jongsma, Rosalind McMahon and Sophie Clark, who were members of that secretariat.

In terms of the content—and I would love to continue to speak to this report on other occasions—Dr Stephen Duckett, the Director of the Health Program from the Grattan Institute, really summed up one of the key things reported in this final report, the seventh report that the committee tabled, when he said:

The 2014 budget did serious damage to Commonwealth-state relations and the confidence with which states could plan and manage health services. It did this by abrogating an agreement about public hospital funding which had been signed by governments of all political persuasions and unilaterally imposing a new funding model on the states.

That is, at its heart, the problem that we faced through the entire 44th Parliament, and this problem, which was constructed by the 2014 budget of Mr Abbott, continues to be a pressing reality, a policy reality that Australia needs to deal with. The fallout that has arisen from that decision to tear up the national health partnerships is absolutely devastating to this country.

As a senator for New South Wales, tonight I really want to talk about the chilling piece of evidence that was given to us in the Campbelltown hearing by Dr Andrew McDonald. I am very pleased to say that the new member for Macarthur, Dr Mike Freelander, is also a paediatrician who works alongside Dr McDonald and is now representing the people of Campbelltown. I am sure he will be a very powerful voice in the other place for the need to redress this massive deficit in funding for New South Wales. Dr Andrew McDonald from Campbelltown Hospital said:

The annual hospitals budget, from New South Wales, is about $20 billion.

And that is quite accurate. The cut in that 2014 budget for the state of New South Wales, as evidenced by the Parliamentary Budget Office, was $17.7 billion. Dr McDonald went on to say:

That is one year's salary, effectively.

…   …   …

You can close the system for a year or you can fund to meet demand … $18.3 billion … is, virtually, a year's New South Wales hospital budget worth of cuts.

So, to understand the scale of what Mr Abbott did in that 2014 budget: if you are a person who wants to access a health service in New South Wales, the cut that Mr Abbott inflicted was a cut the equivalent of shutting down the entire hospital system of the whole state of New South Wales for one year. That cut is still lurking. There is no redress. And the pressure that is on the New South Wales health system is commensurate with the scale of the cut that was inflicted and has not been properly redressed.

Mr Baird described that cut when it happened as: 'a kick in the guts' for the people of the state, and asked:

What services would he like us to cut here in NSW on the back of the funding cuts we've seen overnight?

That was the response of the Liberal Premier, Mr Baird, to the cuts put forward by the Abbott government.

This report is replete with evidence from highly qualified people. Mind you, we could not get the department of health from New South Wales to come forward and put anything on the record; they were powerfully dissuaded from participating—in fact, in our hearing in Broken Hill, we were able to get an email that was sent from the manager telling the people under him not to participate in this inquiry. That is a terrible insult to the people of Broken Hill and to the public servants of New South Wales—that they could not come forward and put on the record the reality of the impact of cuts in Broken Hill, out there in the seat that should be better represented by Ms Ley, their current representative.

I will make further remarks later, but I just want to point out one example of where the federal relationship with the state is particularly important, and that is for cross-border communication and the sharing of responsibility for patients whose needs should be bigger than where the boundary of the state exists. This is evidence that was given to us in the Lismore hearing by a Mr Wilson. I had been asking questions about what happens when people go over, and he said:

Senator O'Neill, you mentioned something about the border crossings before. I have an example for you. There was a patient in Tweed Hospital. I cannot use names because of confidentiality. He was having a big gastric bleed. Instead of being transferred to the Gold Coast where they could have done something about it, he was transferred all the way down to Lismore in the back of an ambulance—with a doctor and a bag full of blood, just in case something happened. I raised this with the JCC, so this is on record there too.

Senator McLucas asked: 'Where was he from?' Mr Wilson answered:

It was at Tweed Hospital. I do not know where he was actually from, but he came from Tweed Hospital. Gold Coast is where? Lismore is where?

Now, for those who don't know, the Tweed Hospital is much, much closer to the Gold Coast than it is to Lismore. This was a man with a serious, life-threatening, major gastric bleed, and who, for the sake of dollars, was loaded into an ambulance, to drive the cost into New South Wales and not into Queensland. That is how much pressure our state budgets are under, that they put this man at risk by putting him in an ambulance, with a doctor—it doesn't matter; they were going to keep the cost in New South Wales; Queenslanders would not have it. This is a very big problem. Mr Wilson continued:

They put him in the ambulance. If you do not know about that situation, you can bleed out inside your stomach and have no external signs very quickly. What was a doctor in the back of an ambulance with a box full of blood going to do? That has been happening progressively since the change of government in Queensland—the blocking of the border—but that is nothing to do with this.

It is a big, big problem, and that is just a taste of a little bit of what we found from New South Wales, and I look forward to making further remarks on further occasions.

Stephen Parry (President) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Thank you, Senator O'Neill. So you would like to keep that document alive by seeking to continue your remarks?

Deborah O'Neill (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Yes, Mr President; I seek leave to continue my remarks later.