Tanya Plibersek (Sydney, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Health) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Corangamite for his question. He has certainly been a very keen advocate for his local community and it was a great pleasure to go with him to the Bellarine Community Health Centre and see the excellent work they do and to speak to their staff about the excellent service they provide. I also saw that the environment there is a little bit run-down. It is a longstanding community health service and this funding gives them the opportunity to improve their patient care by upgrading the physical infrastructure of the place. It is a great feeling to be able to support such a great service by helping them out with a little bit of funding for their physical infrastructure.

The Health and Hospitals Fund has been a terrific investment in health infrastructure around Australia. It has contributed to the building and rebuilding of valuable health facilities in capital cities, suburban areas, regional towns and remote locations right across Australia. This is $5 billion which is being put into health infrastructure; it is $5 billion supporting a huge range of different types of projects like the two that the member for Corangamite spoke about. I have had the enormous pleasure of looking at these facilities and projects from Aurukun on Cape York, to the bottom of Tasmania, over to South Australia and the west—

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