Peter Dutton (Dickson, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Health and Ageing) Share this | Hansard source

You have ‘Reba’ Roxon there trying to run down the clock, but those sorts of premature interruptions are not going to work. The focus groups say, ‘If the Prime Minister said something along these lines—if he acts decisively and says that he is going to make a decisive decision that is in the decisive interests of this country—then we’ll think he’s decisive.’ So what happens? Kevin Rudd trots out the next morning, he does an AM slot, he talks to the newspapers, he does a doorstop and he declares that the Rudd government is going to act decisively in relation to a particular measure. He has done it this time in relation to health. I can tell you that there is no better example of the way in which this government is driven by media spin and not by substance than in the area of health, because all we have seen since the COAG announcements over the weekend is the exact focus-group-driven outcomes and public statements by this Prime Minister. But at the end of the day they mean nothing because he has no intention of carrying out his election commitments. That is why it is important to recognise that this subtle change in the words put on the Prime Minister’s website now gives him the wriggle room to move away from his election commitment that he would fix public hospitals.

There is another statement that this Prime Minister went to the last election with: that he was going to end the blame game. He said, ‘I’m going to end the blame game,’ and, when Australians turned on their TVs and heard him saying that, they thought that what he meant was that he was going to end the blame game to allow him to fix the public hospitals, because Australians knew that state Labor, for the last 10 years or more, had run public hospitals into the ground. So when they heard the Prime Minister, as then opposition leader, saying, ‘I’ll end the blame game; I’ll fix the hospitals,’ they gave him a big tick. They thought, ‘That’s great.’ They thought the end of the waiting list was in sight. They thought that it might now be easier to get in to their GPs or put their aged parents into an aged-care nursing home. They thought this bloke was genuine about fixing the public hospital system. Fast forward 12 months to the end of 2008—we have just marked the first anniversary of the Rudd government—and what has the Rudd government done in relation to health? A big, fat zero.

This is a government that has spent the last 12 months using the words ‘the end of the blame game’; this is, do not forget, the wordsmith Prime Minister. ‘The end of the blame game’, which he used as a slogan during the campaign, has over the last 12 months been political cover for him to become complicit with these state governments in doing nothing—nothing at all—to fix the public hospital system in this country. We had a great, grand media statement from the Prime Minister and the premiers at the COAG conference on Saturday. They came up with this huge sum, which some people could not even comprehend, as the amount of money that they were going to spend on health, but when you look at the detail and scratch below the surface of the press conference you start to worry about what it is they are actually promising.

Let me deal with a couple of issues in relation to the COAG process. When we were in government, we increased spending in relation to health overall, in real terms, by 88 per cent. The total investment in the health and ageing portfolio when we came to government in 1995-96 was $19.5 billion. In 2007-08, under the coalition government, it was $51.8 billion, a real increase of 88 per cent. In terms of Medicare funding, when the Labor Party were in government in 1995-96 they spent $6 billion—

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