Josh Wilson (Fremantle, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Prime Minister. The people of Fremantle voted overwhelmingly for more money for schools and hospitals, not banks. Instead of giving $17 billion to the big banks, a policy for which no Liberal candidate in Western Australia was prepared to argue, why won't the Prime Minister support Labor's plan to invest $5 million to build an urgent care clinic at Fremantle hospital?

Greg Hunt (Flinders, Liberal Party, Minister for Health) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

We aren't just investing $5 million; we are investing an extra $3.4 billion in funding for hospitals in Western Australia. You know what? It was the Western Australian Labor government that signed that agreement with the Prime Minister and that reached that agreement at the COAG earlier this year. On a bipartisan basis, what we saw is the commencement of a process that is now seen as part of a $30 billion increase in hospital funding around Australia. Three Labor states and territories and three coalition states and territories signed up to more hospital funding, and what do we see in Western Australia? In Labor's last year in government, federal funding was $1.4 billion. This year it's $2.2 billion, but under the Prime Minister and the coalition government's agreement it will grow to $3.2 billion. That will be a $3½ billion increase in federal funding to Western Australia for hospitals.

You know what's interesting? At the same time, we know from what the Western Australian government has told us that the Leader of the Opposition and the federal ALP tried to stop WA from signing the agreement. They tried to stop Western Australia from signing up to more hospital funding. So you understand what this is about for the Leader of the Opposition. It's not about more hospital funding in WA—or in Queensland, because he was silent about the slashing cuts of the Palaszczuk government in Queensland. It's not about more funding in Western Australia, because he tried to stop the Western Australian Labor government from signing up to an agreement with the federal government. It's about taking any chance of an advantage, at the cost of the very people he purports to represent. That's his history. That's his practice. That's his approach not just as Leader of the Opposition; that was also his approach when he was a minister in the previous government and when he was a union leader, ripping money off the most vulnerable workers.

At the end of the day, what you see is $3.4 billion of additional federal funding for Western Australia for hospitals, an increase from $1.4 billion to more than double that, $3.4 billion, from when Labor were last in government to when our new hospital agreement reaches its final year. That's real investment, and you can only do that when you've got an economy which supports the ability to invest in new hospitals, in new treatments and in new medicines.