Ms Catherine King (Ballarat, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Health) Share this | Hansard source

I will repeat: obviously, they are a little bit sensitive on this point. Having lied to the Australian people, you are now being caught out when it comes to public hospital funding. You are absolutely being caught out. Your own budget papers say that there is an $80 billion cut to public hospitals and to education and your own health policy document says that you will honour those agreements 50 per cent. That is what they say. The Parliamentary Library paper says:

Unsurprisingly, the response from state and territory governments to the loss of Commonwealth hospital funding has been negative.

The response from the states and territories has been negative because many of the Liberal state governments across the country—Victoria and Queensland are cases in point—have been cutting funding to public hospitals and they know they are about to face a massive shortfall when it comes to funding hospital beds, nurses and doctors. According to the paper:

The Australian Health Care and Hospitals Association … expressed its concern that the change to hospital funding commitments will have an immediate effect on hospital waiting times and standards. Others hold concerns that the potential efficiencies from applying an activity based funding model with an efficient price, will be lost with a return to a population/CPI model which provides no incentive for such efficiencies.

Shame on this government! This government has tried to claim that, somehow or other, it hasn't not told the truth about what is happening with health and education funding, that really it is all not happening until 2017 and that no-one should worry about it. As of 1 July we will see hospital bed closures, elective surgery waiting times begin to climb again and times for people access emergency departments climb and climb again. Every single time that happens it will be on the head of this government, because of their $80 billion worth of cuts to hospitals.

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