David Gillespie (Lyne, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

The Treasury told us and told the nation that if the record deficits were not addressed and the debt was not brought under control, the outlook for the gross national debt was $667 billion, over half a trillion dollars, in 10 years time. We, in government, were left with this legacy after six years of Labor government. To fix that, things will have to change. People on the other side of this House are still living in denial. For things to change hard decisions have to be made, and we have made those hard decisions through this budget. The Prime Minister made many promises—stop the boats, cut the waste, build the roads of the 21st century and bring the budget back under control. Those opposite would all be familiar with those as they have time and time again complained about his making them.

The Medicare levy plays a small part in getting the budget back under control. People think the Medicare levy pays for Medicare. It does not—it pays for less than 20 per cent of Medicare. People have to face the reality that if they want everything paid for by the government the Medicare levy should be five times what it is. People do not want to pay this. I worked in England years ago where the NHS pays for everything but I had to pay almost 11 per cent on top of my tax as a NHS loading. At least they are honest with people over there and tell them how much their government-paid-for health system actually costs. We are living under a giant delusion that the Medicare levy pays for it all, but it is only paying for part of it. So we have to do things differently. It takes a wise and sound government to make the hard decisions.

The people on the other side have criticised us for breaking promises. I will run through a few of their achievements. Earlier, we heard claims of a long list of broken promises. Since they decided to take on the issue of health, we might have to remind them of what they did to medical research. What about changing the accounting for the NHMRC—talk about doing mean and tricky things! In the last Labor budget, instead of accounting for funding on a quarterly basis in advance they changed it to monthly in arrears, effectively avoiding the payment of a quarter of a year of funding and striking $120 million out of the NHMRC. What about the medical bureaucracy that grew like mushrooms under the previous government? Look at the cost of that. The Rudd and Gillard Labor government established 10 new federal bureaucracies. Look at the human cost of those bureaucracies. When people walk into an accident and emergency department with their kids they do not want to be met by a bureaucrat with a clipboard, they want to see a doctor or a nurse or someone else who can help them. Bureaucracy abounded, and that could not continue in a system under such financial strain.

The Australian National Preventive Health Agency provides further examples of waste through bureaucracy. They spent the princely sum of $463,000 doing a study on the potential of a fat tax. The economists involved in the study discovered that a fat tax would prove to be a cumbersome chore, with undesirable side effects. It would mean higher prices for lean meat as well as for fatty burgers. Another bureaucratic financial waste was the use of $236,000 to build an advertisement for a fake music festival and place it on Facebook to get their messages out. After wasting their money on fat, they then spent their money supporting fat tyre burnouts at the Summernats—$130,000 was spent on grants to the Summernats so the participants could do fat tyre burnouts. (Time expired)

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