Kevin Rudd (Griffith, Australian Labor Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Hansard source

What did the Leader of the Opposition have to say? He said as follows, ‘I did not rip a billion dollars out of health.’ He went on to say, ‘What happened was that in 1996, long before I was health minister, the forward estimates were reduced by $1 billion.’ But that is not true. Let us go back again to the budget papers referred to earlier today by the Minister for Finance and Deregulation. What do the 1996-97 budget papers actually show was the reduction in health expenditure then? The 1996-97 budget papers show a reduction of $312 billion. That was a misleading statement by the Leader of the Opposition on the radio program as he sought simply to slough it off and say, ‘Not my responsibility, it was those bad people back in 1996.’ Peter Costello was Treasurer at the time and later made some reflections about the overall level of economic competence of the current Leader of the Opposition which were that, in fact, he had none at all.

We then move on to excuse No. 3, and that is the Leader of the Opposition out there, day after day, saying he had nothing whatsoever to do with the billion-dollar gouge out of the system. But once again facts confront us.

See this speech in context