Sussan Ley (Farrer, Liberal Party, Minister for Health) Share this | Hansard source

to $18.3 billion in 2017-18. Let us look at Labor's record, because Labor talks the big talk on hospital funding. What we will not do in the Liberal and National parties is fund inefficiency and waste. I remember previous Prime Minister Rudd being so desperate to get the states to sign up to hospital funding and to paint the picture that they were solving the hospital funding crisis that he funded the states on activity, which in a sense you can understand. There is a rationale there: the more activity you get, the more money you get. But he was so desperate for them to sign up that he just put funding guarantees over the top—he just guaranteed their funding. They did not have to do anything to achieve that funding. It was just sitting there; basically cream off the top.

Unfortunately, we do not have the dollars to allocate from nowhere to fund inefficiency and waste in public hospitals. It is absolutely important that what we get right is the interaction between primary care and the public health system. I met with my New South Wales counterpart, Jillian Skinner, and we talked very constructively about future hospital agreements—

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