Nicola Roxon (Gellibrand, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Health and Ageing) Share this | Hansard source

I am not going to have this process be abused through the shadow minister opposite not being prepared to listen to the answers. If he wants us to answer his questions, that is fine; we will. Otherwise we will let all the statements go, I will answer them all at the end and we will not be any further down the track.

The criteria that we made clear at the election and have made clear since are that we want to look at a range of things: have the states and territories signed on to significant reform to deliver better and more services through our public hospitals? I am on the record as saying that the COAG agreement that was reached last year was a significant step to that. On 1 July, all of the new requirements—reporting, new accountabilities and moves to activity based funding—come into place under our new National Healthcare Agreement. The shadow minister opposite does not want to acknowledge that we have been able to achieve more in terms of increased accountability and more transparent reporting than those opposite were ever able to introduce in their 11 years in government.

These are big changes, but I am not pretending—I would not pretend to the shadow minister opposite or to the public—that we have all of the answers right here today. We actually set up the health reform commission to provide us with advice, ideas and recommendations about what we will do into the future. We will look at it as well as at the performance in our public hospitals. We know that the State of our hospitals report, for example, will also be released at about that time; it provides a lot of data, albeit some of it is not as current as would be useful. The new investments that are coming online do not immediately show in some of the data, which has lag time, and I am sure that the shadow minister understands that. We will be making some further statements in the coming weeks on the process that will be followed for us to make that decision, and no amount of yelling and screaming by the shadow minister opposite takes away from the fact that we have invested a record amount in public hospitals—something that they never did—and are delivering benefits by working with our state and territory colleagues.

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