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

I rise today to talk about the healthcare emergency that has been created by this government's $50 billion worth of cuts to our public hospital system, and the effect that these cuts will have on the hundreds and thousands of nurses and midwives across Australia, some of whom are in the gallery today, and the millions of patients that they care for every day in GP practices, in community health centres, in home based nursing care and in our public hospital system.

When it comes to health care, Australians are being let down by the most uncompassionate government since Federation, and they are being let down by the most ineffective health minister this country has ever seen. These $50 billion cuts are the equivalent of cutting one in five nursing positions across the country—one in five nursing positions across the country! These are front-line services, people who are caring for some of the most sick and vulnerable in our communities, who are keeping older people within their own homes. And it comes at a time when Health Workforce Australia has estimated there is already a shortage of some 20,000 nurses in this country, and more shortages to come. Indeed Health Workforce Australia has said:

… without nationally coordinated reform Australia is likely to experience limitations in the delivery of high quality health services—

as a consequence of a highly significant shortage of more than 109,000 nurses.

So what is the government's response to this nursing workforce crisis? The government's response is to: abolish Health Workforce Australia, and the Senate is considering those bills this week; cut $142 million in funding for health workforce planning; and to get rid of more than 140 jobs in South Australia. This is at a time when public hospitals across the country are struggling to meet their emergency department waiting times and their elective surgery waiting times.

And it is not just the Labor Party that is saying it. Australia's most ineffective health minister has managed to unite the entire health sector against the government with his cruel cuts and lack of any compassion. It takes a pretty special health minister to unite the entire healthcare sector against you and against the government's unfair budget. He likes to be critical of this side of the place, but what he does not seem to understand is that there is every health expert in the country saying your budget is a dud. It is an absolute dud and will damage the healthcare system in this country. It fundamentally undermines the universal principles of Medicare and it actually changes the entire way in which our healthcare system operates. Fifty billion dollars being cut and ripping up the national partnership agreements that saw the relationship between the Commonwealth and the states starting, for the first time, to actually begin to focus on health policy reform—reform that is needed to make the system more efficient. Ripping up those agreements and ripping $50 billion out of public hospitals—it is an absolute disgrace.

The Australian Medical Association President, Associate Professor Brian Owler, last month summed up the health sector's response to this government's backward, inequitable and unfair vision for health care in this country. He said:

The message is clear: the measures add up to bad health policy.

Professor Owler went on to say:

The health measures in the federal budget are almost universally opposed by the people who provide health services in Australia. The [Australian Medical Association] is at the forefront of this opposition.

And we know what the impact will be on nurses and midwives across the country and on the patients that they care for. The Australian Nursing and Midwifery Federation has said these are cuts that will damage the healthcare system. They are cuts that the acting secretary of the ANMF said:

… ripped the heart out of the Australian health system and as a former Health Minister, [the Prime Minister] should be ashamed of that.

And it is not just nurses working in hospitals who will be affected by these changes. Nurses working in general practice across Australia and in private practice will be hit by these cuts. In particular, I want to refer to some correspondence from a GP practice in Ingham and the effect that these new taxes will have on that practice. It said:

We as a practice currently make a loss per dressing we perform. We offer this service as a benefit to the community and to the patients of our practice. We charge no dressing fee to patients due to our belief that this would cause unreasonable hardship for these 'at risk' patients … We perform 20-30 dressings per day.

These are often older patients suffering from things like leg ulcers, wound care that sometimes requires up to three visits a week. Dr Elliott goes on to detail the cuts in this budget to MBS items and then said:

This is clearly not affordable for the practice to absorb these costs. This would result in our practice ceasing to offer this service which would result in patients having to attend Ingham Hospital for these dressings where the costs would be borne completely by the taxpayer at a higher rate. We then would reduce our nurse numbers.

This is not the Labor Party saying it.

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