Kevin Rudd (Griffith, Australian Labor Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the Leader of the Opposition for his question and in his listing of the litany he skipped happily over a number of facts, including the state of our public hospital system and the funding proposals which we have put forward to fix that. I remind the Leader of the Opposition that he went on the public record some years ago to say that he believed the perfect public policy response on his part was to take over the national hospital system of Australia from the states. What I instead proposed as Prime Minister, and what Prime Minister Gillard subsequently followed up on, was an arrangement with the states whereby we would provide 60 per cent of the funding of the public hospital system in order to provide durable public funding from the Commonwealth into the future. My successor as Prime Minister then undertook a further negotiation with the states which landed that at 50 per cent.

Can I say to the Leader of the Opposition a very simple thing? That is, under his period as health minister we saw the level of federal contributions to the public hospital system go down and down and down. Therefore, when the states around Australia said that there was a problem with the hospital system, it was necessary for the Commonwealth to step in and we did.

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