Tony Abbott (Warringah, Liberal Party, Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Hansard source

The more they squeal, the more their embarrassment shows. The Prime Minister comes in and talks about insulin pumps. I provided the funding for insulin pumps. What a fraud! What a phoney! What a complete fake this Prime Minister is! What a disgrace to the great office of the prime ministership of this country this man is!

I suppose we cannot expect anything remotely approaching magnanimity or graciousness from this Prime Minister, but let us, if we may, look at his health and hospital policies. He asks what my response is. My response is the same response as that of the state Labor premiers. Some of them question it; some of them oppose it. I question all of the policy and I oppose much of the policy because, just as his climate change policy is a great big new tax on everything, his hospitals policy is a great big new bureaucracy. That is what his health and hospital policy is.

He says that what he wants to do is to have a hospitals system which is nationally funded and locally run. He is wrong on both counts. It will not be nationally funded because the states will still have to provide 40 per cent of the funding. Believe me, a Prime Minister trying to make the states put up that money is a Prime Minister who has never had the kind of experience that any Prime Minister who is really going to bring about public hospital reform needs. He says that it is locally run. The only way it will be locally run is if he can persuade the state Labor governments to provide genuine local control of public hospitals.

This is the test of his local hospital networks. Will each significant public hospital have its own board? Will each of those boards comprise people who are genuinely experts in the fields of health management and governance? Will those people be genuinely independent of government and not just the sort of union hacks which this government typically appoints to boards? Will they have real management authority and real autonomy over the public hospitals? Will they be able to make decisions about the public hospital’s budget without reference to head office? And if they are able to raise money locally, can the Prime Minister guarantee that there will not be any compensating adjustment to the funding that they get from the states and the Commonwealth?

He cannot answer any of those questions. How do we know he cannot answer any of those questions? Because the state premiers have put those questions to him and they have told us that he has not been able to provide any detail. They have told the world that there is no detail. The trouble with the Prime Minister’s health and hospitals plan is that it will not end the blame game because the states still have to provide 40 per cent of the funding. It will not produce any extra money until 2014. What it will do is provide just another bureaucracy as the only people who currently know anything about casemix funding transfer from the states to the Commonwealth. Casemix funding does make some sense in principle, at least for our larger public hospitals, but the only people who know anything about casemix funding in this country are the people running the Victorian public hospital system, and the one person who is most ferociously opposing the Prime Minister’s plans is the Premier of Victoria. To the great credit of the Victorian Labor government, they have left the hospital system put in place by the former Premier Jeff Kennett largely in place.

Victoria is the large eastern state with by far the best public hospital system, and it does not want its public hospital system wrecked by this Prime Minister. It does not want its public hospital system wrecked by someone who is engaging in amateur hour experimentation. It does not want its public hospital system wrecked by someone who made such a mess of the nation’s roofs through his failed and disastrous Home Insulation Program.

Why would Premier Brumby want to put in charge of his public hospital system the same man who, when he tried to take charge of the nation’s homes, created up to 50,000 electrified roofs and 240,000 dodgy and dangerous roofs and who is responsible for the greatest public administration disaster in this country’s history? Why would you trust this Prime Minister with something as serious as public hospitals when he could not be trusted with something as simple as insulating the nation’s homes? He could not be trusted with fixing schools, he could not be trusted with fixing roofs and he should not be trusted with the nation’s public hospital system.

This Prime Minister has form when it comes to public hospitals. Not for nothing was he known as Dr Death when he was in Queensland. Not for nothing did they call him Dr Death, because the first thing he did when he was the Director-General in Queensland was close—

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