Andrew Laming (Bowman, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

You may be somewhat over the sight of me at this point of time in the morning, but I did want to extend on my comments on dental health to talk about the bigger picture of Queensland health and hospital funding.

Opposition Member:

An opposition member interjecting—

Andrew Laming (Bowman, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The member opposite should be careful: I will turn to Victoria and it's even messier picture down there.

Certainly, both sides would agree that, over time, the Commonwealth's great challenge is that, as it sequentially increased funding in social policy, often the states have soft-pedalled in return. For every dollar we'd push in—you'd recall this, even from the Rudd-Gillard era—often it was very hard to be sure that the states would match that funding and not pocket the difference. There are many ways to deal with that, but my concern is that it continues to happen in Queensland.

What's certainly not in dispute is the massive increase in funding for hospitals coming from the Commonwealth side. It's worth reflecting here that that increase has been from $16.5 billion to Queensland hospitals during the Rudd-Gillard era to $28.4 billion during the equivalent coalition period. They're big increases. Obviously, the economy grows in size as well, but it does put to bed this notion of cuts—because, wherever the Labor Party are looking for some kind of political opportunity, we know over this side that they normally pick a social policy, insert words and follow them with 'cuts' or 'cut to the bone' or 'rip the guts out of'. Usually, they focus test it with a few groups and then they let it rip.

In reality, we know that both sides are strong funders of hospitals over time, but, increasingly, it's appearing that the coalition, through better economic management, is putting more money where it matters—and for hospitals it's quite simple: $16.2 billion into the Queensland health system. All of that increase between 2016 and 2017 was the Commonwealth component. As I alluded to before, what we found out was that, at the same time, the Palaszczuk government cut their funding contribution by about $63 million in their own budget papers, but they can still crow about increased spending overall. The record down here in Canberra isn't much better. Bill Shorten promised $57 billion but has only ever shown us where $2 billion of that would come from. A $55 billion black hole is also something of concern because, in tough economic times, those kinds of sums are pretty hard to find. We doubt that Labor will ever find them.

These unfunded commitments are not dissimilar to what we saw from the Labor Party with Gonski—the first four years just having modest increases and then back-ending all of that funding into the last two years, when you knew you never had to find the money. We're increasingly seeing that the Labor Party's approach has been found out. When voters get lied to about cuts, when in fact funding's going up, and then discover that they have been lied to, they will go after that party. We stuck with the Gonski agreement for four years, but for the funny money in the never-never period, we didn't. Now that is the last remaining claim that Labor can make about funding cuts. If you want to talk about a negative funding cut, because we're actually increasing funding, you're welcome to do it. Good luck with your next scare campaign. I think you'll struggle.