Michelle Rowland (Greenway, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Minister for Health and Ageing. What action is the government taking to implement new financing arrangements for hospitals? How have these proposals been received and what is the government’s response?

Nicola Roxon (Gellibrand, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Health and Ageing) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Greenway for her question. She is a very passionate advocate for services in her electorate, including Blacktown Hospital, for which she has been campaigning for a very long time. For her community, as for many others, the health reforms being proposed by this government give an answer for a long-held problem, which is: how do we get enough funds into our hospitals where they are needed? The bill that the Treasurer will introduce later this week into the House, to reform the federal financial relations of our health system and the way we fund them, will have a fundamental impact on communities across the country so that we are able to say for the first time that the Commonwealth is stepping up to shoulder a 60 per cent share of funding for our hospitals and that we will be paying for services directly to our hospitals without any capacity for states potentially to keep some of that money, without any handing over of block funding and no accountability for where that money will go.

The member for Greenway asked how had this proposal been received and what had the response been. Of course we have the agreement from seven states and territories to these proposed changes. We have very high-level support from the AMA, from the nurses, from professionals across the country. We actually have very high-level support from previous health ministers, even including the Leader of the Opposition. When he was the health minister, he used to argue that states should be required to publish detailed information about the specific performance of hospitals. He used to actively argue that in the medium term we needed to see a move towards activity based funding. But there has been an interesting thing since the member opposite, who is now the Leader of the Opposition, has stopped being the health minister: he has been silent on these reforms and whether the Liberal Party will support these reforms in the House. He has been absolutely silent about whether he supports a 60 per cent funding of our hospitals, whether he supports activity based funding and whether he supports doctors and nurses in local areas having more say about how their hospital services are run and, as always, he seems to be adopting the same approach, which is to studiously ignore that this is a vital issue for the community and that the Liberal Party and the opposition will have to come to a view on whether or not they will support these changes. So I wondered whether it was because we had not put this in a way that the Leader of the Opposition found attractive, because I can tell him communities across the country want this changed; they want more support for doctors and nurses; they want their hospital services properly funded. I thought perhaps the Leader of the Opposition might be inclined to support our changes if I put it like this: Leader of the Opposition, we can stop the waste, we can pay more money to our hospitals, we can stop the need for big, new state taxes and we can open more beds, and we hope you will support us.