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

I am comfortable with providing comment on amendments if members want to raise questions on it. I am not going to allow this parliament to descend into a rambling Q and A from a shadow minister who has not asked me a question in question time for two years and is asking a question about something which is actually not the remit of this bill. He wants to know if there are financial penalties. This bill does not deal with financial arrangements between the states and territories.

This bill and the amendments deal with the reporting of poor performance. He might want to ask, if there is that poor performance, what other sorts of financial impacts are there? But he cannot turn this debate into a general Q and A session when he cannot get through his own tactics people a question in question time and has not bothered to ask me a question about health or health reform for two years in question time. He cannot now come in here and try to use this for a rambling discussion about a whole range of other things.

What we have before us is a detailed bill which is a fundamental change to the way that performance is going to be reported about our hospitals. It is going to provide much more information to the public and it is going to have a much more rigorous assessment process so that states and territories are not able to have poor data or, in an even worse scenario, have it somehow presented in a way which is fraudulent, as unfortunately we have seen with a couple of reported cases in various hospitals across the country. No state or territory wants that to happen either, so this is now a process, and, with the amendments, is an agreed procedure between the states and the territories.

I am very comfortable that it gives the new independent authority far-reaching power to do things that have never been done in our federation before. I accept that there are people in this House, and the member for Lyne is clearly one of them, who think that they are good steps but would like it to go even further. I accept that there are people who have that view, and I would imagine that there are people in that category who—once this bill is passed, if it is passed, and once the authority is set up—will be campaigners who will see what it delivers and will want to argue for further change into the future.

But that is different to coming in here, as the federal opposition is doing, and having a general spray about every issue that they are frustrated about not being able to raise elsewhere and expecting me to enter into a debate with them about it. There are other forums of this House. Bring on a matter of public importance. Do some work yourself and move an amendment, rather than interjecting that the member for Lyne should move one if he feels strongly about this. Where are yours on that, if you think this is such an important issue? Let us actually use the parliament for what is intended. We are clearly going to have to agree to disagree. We get an opportunity to vote on these amendments.

I understood, when I came into the House and asked the shadow minister if he was voting for these amendments, that he said yes. Now he has a whiff that the member for Lyne is not, so the opposition have changed their minds and now are not voting for the amendments. This is the sort of policymaking that the federal opposition are into. They are not actually reading the bill. They are not making a decision about whether this is good or bad policy. They are looking at the politics. They think that if they have got one Independent they will be able to knock off this bill and that might be an embarrassment to the government, so they will jump on it.

None of this is to do with any desire that the shadow minister has for hospitals to improve their services across the country. I am very confident that this bill, if enacted, will deliver fundamental change to the way we report hospital performance across the country. It is on that basis that I commend the bill to the House, and I think that if the shadow minister does not have anything to say that is relevant to this debate then we should put the question that these amendments be agreed to.

See this speech in context