Peter Dutton (Dickson, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Health and Ageing) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker. The current Prime Minister earlier this year unceremoniously dumped the Rudd clawback of GST and the commitment to major funding to public hospitals and is now only going to provide around 40 per cent of public hospital funding. Yet in last year's election campaign the Prime Minister also stated:

… I regard health care as one of the greatest responsibilities of any government.

  …   …   …

If my government is returned to office on August 21, I will pursue our national reforms until the job is done.

We all know that standing by commitments and promises to the Australian people is not a high priority for this Prime Minister or indeed her government. Her actions in health are every bit as egregious as the reversal of her promise that no government she led would introduce a carbon tax—a tax the Australian people do not want but one she steadfastly insists upon inflicting on them by mid next year.

Despite multiple and embarrassing backdowns in health, the overblown rhetoric of this government does not disappear and consequently Labor's self-assessed historic Council of Australian Governments agreem­ent of April last year has been replaced by another historic agreement of the COAG meeting of February this year, according to the minister when introducing this bill. It seems historic agreements come and go quickly under this Labor government. It remains to be seen whether Ms Gillard's efforts will survive longer than her predeces­sor's, for all she has at the moment is an agreement to reach an agreement and she is still negotiating with the states to get a final deal. We will see the final outcome at the next COAG meeting, whenever that might be, but, as the amendments now before the House make clear, the states are not accepting Labor's so-called reforms. We know that in the last 24 hours the planned COAG meeting has been delayed because they cannot get agreement—

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