Joe Hockey (North Sydney, Liberal Party, Manager of Opposition Business in the House) Share this | Hansard source

Well, it is a danger. Dentists in the private sector have these huge costs associated with their businesses. Ultimately, dentists, like all other professionals, are businesspeople; they are running a small business and they have to charge for their costs. The Howard government scheme of Medicare dental actually did address some of that challenge. The new government scheme says, ‘No, we’ll do it all out of our public hospitals,’ which can only be described as ‘challenging operations’ under the existing system, let alone when more people pour into the public hospitals in search of dental care.

I say finally on this bill and more generally on health: the Prime Minister said before the election that the buck stops with him. He said that he will do something about hospitals in Australia. The coalition will keep him to his word. The now Prime Minister said, ‘We will fix the hospitals.’ He committed, ‘If the hospitals are not fixed by 2009’—not ‘if in 2009 the government does not have a plan to fix them’—‘then the buck stops with me.’ ‘We will have a referendum,’ the Prime Minister said, ‘to take over the hospitals from the states.’ We are in the process of supporting a number of government initiatives in relation to health, but the government is on notice that, when it comes to that promise, we will hold the Prime Minister accountable for every single word and we will ensure that he honours his commitment to the Australian people to fix the health system.

But on the form that has been shown by the government to date—with the sustained attack on private health insurance, which is going to put more people into the public hospitals; with the demolition of Medicare dental, which is going to put more people into the public hospitals; and with the flimsy commitments of the government to ongoing demands from the states in relation to better accountability in statistical collection and in the day-to-day operations of the hospitals—I can see no way the Prime Minister is going to meet his commitments to provide Australia and the Australian people with better quality hospitals and better health services. I expect that in 2009 and beyond the Prime Minister’s words that ‘the buck stops with me’ will come back to haunt him.

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