Trevor Evans (Brisbane, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I withdraw. It is a fact that this government is delivering record levels of government money towards health. We are delivering more this year than last year, more than in any year before, and certainly more than in any year under Labor. Anyone who is inclined to believe these Labor lines should just ask a Labor politician to show them an actual graph of the funding delivered over recent years. They will see very clearly what I am about to say. The budget papers show very clearly how the federal government's health funding is growing every single year. The federal government's contribution to health is $71.4 billion this financial year. It rises to $73.4 billion next year and $76 billion the year after that. Then it rises to $79 billion in 2020. Anyone who cares about health funding can confirm what I have just said for themselves. These numbers are in the budget papers. People can go straight to the source and check this out themselves. The budget papers are online—budget paper No. 1, statement five, page 5-49. It shows the government spending there and our commitments under area under health. It is all there in black and white. They can see straight away that the numbers are going up, not down. They are going up by an amount that is higher than the rate of inflation and the rate of population growth combined. It is increasing per person, per year in real terms. You can clearly see there that about half the federal government's health budget goes to Medicare. I will come back to Medicare in a moment. About a quarter of it goes to the states to help them run the states' hospital systems. The federal government, of course, does not manage hospitals. The remainder is split between the PBS, other health services and specific Indigenous health services.

There is one area in the budget where those numbers are not going consistently up and are not at record levels. That is administration expenses. It is probably a topic for another day to talk about the difference between the coalition and Labor governments when it comes to managing administration expenses.

Those opposite have said quite a bit about Medicare in their speeches here today, so I will focus on that for a moment. The budget papers show that this government is delivering record funding to Medicare. It is there in black and white. Our funding of Medicare is going up each year, not down, and it is going up by an amount higher than population growth and inflation combined.

Labor's next line that needs to be called out is that they are trying to say that they would have spent more had they had the opportunity. They want us to believe that if they promised to spend more, then somehow that equates to cuts on our side, even though our actual funding continues to go up. This is a case of promises, promises from Labor. Labor promised extra funding at exactly the same time as they promised this country three surpluses. That never eventuated either. The ABC fact checker called this out repeatedly. I quote from the ABC fact checker:

It is far from certain that the Gillard promises would ever have been fulfilled. They were looking far into the future and their increases were never budgeted for. History shows budgets change dramatically from year to year, and something cannot be taken away if it was never given in the first place.

See this speech in context