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

This is just a disgraceful attempt by Labor to besmirch what is and should be a bipartisan initiative around medical research. I know that you have to pick your fights, member for Throsby, but why you would pick this one I do not know. Your record on medical research—I should not say 'your' because I do not know that you were intimately involved—you may not know that Labor's record on medical research is appalling. I think the most appalling act of all was in 2011, when you took $400 million out of the budget for medical research, and when there was of course an outcry from the sector you sheepishly put it back. There was another tricky accounting exercise of, from memory, $110 million designed to starve the sector of funds and make out that you cared when in fact you did not.

To ask me, as the Minister for Health, about the Medical Research Future Fund, I am delighted. Trying to characterise my comments about Finance legislation is pretty ridiculous because there are many pieces of legislation and initiatives in this place that go across portfolio. This fund is being set up and established by finance—and Treasury, by extension—so of course it is a piece of finance legislation. The operation of it all will involve the health portfolio because it will be around initiatives for medical research.

Labor can play games with this bill as it passes through the House and Labor can hold it up, but what Labor is doing is giving a clear signal to the medical research sector that the investment we propose in this bill, which has never been initiated anywhere else in the world and which will change the landscape for medical research in this country permanently, is something about which you want to go 'Ho-hum, we're not sure if we like it,' or, more to the point, 'Let's see if we can pick some holes in it and play politics with it.' What would have been much better would have been if Labor had stood up and said: 'We support this bill. There may be assurances that we seek'—and they, by the way, are assurances we could always give and we always would have given. Labor's comments about the advisory board and the Chief Scientist are ones that are quite sensible, but you did not have to make them political. You did not have to introduce them into the parliament and then hold up the passage of this bill as a result.

Of course the disbursement of funds will be in accordance with our research priorities. The meetings the Prime Minister is chairing—which include the Chief Scientist and include the education portfolio, the health portfolio and the industry portfolio—that I have attended are designed to set our national research priorities. As a government we will have those research priorities in place, and I expect that they will be relatively bipartisan, especially if the Chief Scientist is involved. It makes perfect sense that a sensibly constituted, industry supported advisory group would advise the Medical Research Future Fund, once it is established, about how it should disburse the funds. Let us remember that we have a goal—it is a challenging goal, but I know we will get there—of $20 billion in the corpus of the fund by 2020. This budget has announced that there will be $400 million over the next four years in disbursements from the Medical Research Future Fund. That is in addition to the funding that we provide for medical research through the National Health and Medical Research Council, which is about $800 million a year. This is separate from that. It is a separate process. It will have an advisory board but it will link to Australia's research priorities. How this could possibly be coming as any surprise to the Labor Party has been a mystery to me. The only signal that Labor are making on medical research is that they want to play politics with it; they do not care about it—and, when you glance back at their record and you see these dodgy manoeuvres from the past, you realise that they actually do not care.

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