Sophie Scamps (Mackellar, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Minister for Health and Ageing. The Northern Beaches Hospital in Mackellar has provided both public and private services under a public-private partnership. Following the private operator Healthscope entering receivership in May this year, the announcement that public services would be transitioned to NSW Health was indeed very welcome. However, there is great uncertainty about the continuation of the world-class private services delivered there. Minister, what reassurance can you provide my community regarding ongoing access to all the private services at Northern Beaches Hospital?

Mark Butler (Hindmarsh, Australian Labor Party, Deputy Leader of the House) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I acknowledge the member's advocacy for the return of this privatised hospital, effectively, to public hands. Can I remind the House that no Labor government has privatised hospitals over the last 30 years, while Liberal government after Liberal government around the country has persisted with this failed experiment of privatising public acute care hospitals.

The first time I dealt with it was in the north-eastern suburbs of Adelaide, back in the 1990s, when Healthscope—the same company—was given the contract to run the Modbury Hospital. The member for Makin will remember: it was a debacle and had to be brought in-house. We've seen repeat after repeat of this failed Liberal Party experiment to privatise our public acute care hospitals. We know the Auditor-General's report from New South Wales confirmed that sense of failure. It doesn't integrate properly into the public hospital system—that's what the New South Wales Auditor-General found—and there is a tension between profit and proper clinical care that should not happen in an acute care public hospital.

The private hospital system, as the member knows better than most, is very different. It's largely there for planned procedures—

Of course, here you go: the Liberal Party seeking to defend failed privatisation experiments, because, at the end of the day, like Pavlov's dog, they return to the idea that we should have a privatised model of health care. That's not the member's view. It's not the Labor Party's view.

I do know, though, that the very hard work the New South Wales Minister for Health is doing here to unwind this privatisation, over a relatively short period of time, is one that is seeking to reassure, first of all, doctors, nurses and other healthcare staff at that hospital that they'll have jobs and that the clinical services at this hospital will be up to scratch. I think there's a close process of consultation there. They'll all have jobs offered. Their entitlements will transfer to NSW Health if they choose to take up that offer.

As the member also knows, the New South Wales government is consulting closely with clinicians and the community about what private hospital services will continue to be available on that precinct, on that hospital site, and I'm keeping in touch with the New South Wales minister about that. Obviously, as the member knows, this is all complicated by the fact that Healthscope, more broadly, which runs well over 30 hospitals, including in the Northern Beaches and across the country, is now in receivership. So we are taking the lead as the Commonwealth for making sure that there is continuity of service from all of those other Healthscope hospitals. We took a decision as two governments that New South Wales Health would lead on, essentially, unwinding arrangements and guaranteeing private and public services on the Northern Beaches site. But, if the member wants me to update her and keep representing these issues to the New South Wales minister, of course, I'd be more than happy to.