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

I thank the member for her question. We are pleased that the $7.3 billion of additional health investments is not only funding national programmes, such as the ones my colleagues have spoken about in Indigenous health, aged care, Medicare and the PBS, but also supporting individual communities. We are starting to see the flow of that funding, for example in the announcement I was able to make today at Wollongong Hospital.

In Tasmania the investments are also very significant. Under the health care agreement negotiated in 2008, where we saw a 50 per cent increase in funding following the pulling out of money by the previous government, Tasmania received an extra $1.3 billion for its health and hospital services. With the new health care agreement on top of that, Tasmania will receive an additional $458 million and benefit from the Commonwealth’s taking on an increasing share of funding, which means that an additional $340 million will flow to the benefit of Tasmanians.

We can see and break down the funding in all sorts of different areas. For example, there is the emergency department money—$3.5 million—which is already flowing to the Royal Hobart Hospital and the $3.7 million for the north of the member for Franklin’s state which is going to the emergency department development at North West Regional Hospital in Burnie. There will be more funding from this year’s budget with the money beginning to roll out across the community from 1 July this year. For example, there is another $11 million to help support the rollout of the four-hour target for emergency departments and just under $10 million for capital money as well as money to support almost another 20,000 ED presentations across Tasmania.

Those examples are just from emergency departments, but we could go through the same for elective surgeries and subacute care. In Tasmania, where the population is small but the community is quite widely dispersed, making sure that there are sufficient funds to be able to provide as many services as possible close to people’s homes is very important. The cancer investments that have been made are very welcome in Tasmania, and we are keen to continue working with our colleagues, who have some particular challenges in elective surgery. There are some long-wait patients in Tasmania, where there are simply not enough specialists available to provide the services, but we are working closely with the Tasmanian government to see how we can use this new investment in hospitals not only to provide better ongoing services but also to help break a backlog accumulated over many years, including those years when the country was under the previous government.

This is part of our determination to invest in health and make sure we deliver better outcomes to the community. We are only able to do this as a result of our very careful work during the economic crisis. We now have our budget in a good position, where we are able to make investments of over $7 billion in health, and that will be welcome in the community, because we know that families across the country—particularly older Australians—rely desperately on our health services and these investments, particularly in our hospitals, will make an enormous difference to those members of the community.

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