Darren Chester (Gippsland, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

Yes! The health and wellbeing of regional Australians will be affected as this government fails to keep its promises to invest in the promised health infrastructure and service delivery throughout regional areas.

One of the biggest preventative health issues in our nation is ensuring that all Australians have the decency of a job. The ability to be gainfully employed has a flow-on benefit to all aspects of family health and wellbeing. Those opposite continue to come in here and parrot their key messages—their key lines from the focus groups—about ‘working families’, but I fear that in 2009 we are going to hear a lot more about ‘out-of-work families’. They will not be working families any more; we will be hearing about out-of-work families.

One of the great legacies of the former government was the number of jobs it was able to assist in creating in a quite buoyant economy. As we move into 2009, the forecast of further growth in unemployment is going to start hurting families across Australia. And the forecast budget surplus has already gone. There will be no further opportunities to draw down on the good work of the previous government for public hospitals or for anything else. As the Leader of the Opposition correctly warned last week, when he was speaking in the House, experience and history tell us that Labor deficits are never temporary.

Deputy Speaker, it gives me no pleasure—I take no relish in standing here today—in criticising the government for its failure to manage Australia’s budget and deliver the promised improvements to the public hospital system. I am a person who believes in outcomes and, as a member of the Nationals, my main concern is with everyday Australians in rural, regional and coastal communities. They are my No. 1 focus. They have the right to a quality health service; it is a fundamental right for all Australians. It gives me no pleasure at all to stand here and talk about the administration of hospitals being run down over the past decade of state Labor administrations. As I said, I believe that providing quality health services is a fundamental right for all Australians, regardless of their postcodes. I accept it is an enormous challenge for the government of the day. But, as we have seen repeatedly, the state Labor administrations are simply not up to the job.

The Prime Minister made a lot of promises prior to the federal election about where the buck stops, but you simply do not treat patients with empty rhetoric. Some of the empty words from the Prime Minister were:

I have a long-term plan to fix our nation’s hospitals. I will be responsible for implementing my plan, and I state this with absolute clarity: the buck will stop with me.

As I mentioned before, it is more likely to be the peso or the yen that will stop with the Prime Minister these days. We all accept that times are tough, but being in government is all about making the hard decisions. I have only been here for a short time but I have already learnt that when it comes to the Labor Party there is always someone else to blame. If it is not the previous government, it is the global financial crisis. They bleat about it continually. If it is not their fault, they blame the state governments or they go to the previous administration, the coalition government, despite the fact they were handed a surplus in excess of $20 billion. The people of Australia are worse off today than they were 12 months ago, and I fear the worst is yet to come. (Time expired)

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