Fiona Nash (NSW, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you, Senator Mason. All I can say is that she has not been out to any of those communities and seen the hospitals, which are actually getting worse. I would like to know how many of our regional hospitals in New South Wales the health minister has actually visited. I would ask the health minister to come forward and tell us and the people of Australia how many of the hospitals in regional New South Wales she has actually visited. I hope she would come back and say, ‘I’ve visited lots of them.’ I am imagining, though, that she may well not have visited many at all. If she had, I do not see how she could have come to the conclusion that there had been an improvement in hospitals. It is yet another example of the complete disconnect that the Rudd Labor government has with regional Australia. We see it in hospitals; they have got no understanding. Obviously they think they have improved, but they have not. We see it in the millions of dollars that have been ripped out of agricultural research and development. We see it in the millions of dollars that have been ripped out of the Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry. We have seen it in the changes to the Youth Allowance program that are going to significantly disadvantage regional students. These are all examples of how, time and time again, the Rudd Labor government is absolutely ripping the heart out of regional communities—and there is no place better to see where this is occurring than in the area of health.

For the health minister to say that there has been an improvement in public hospitals when we have got hospitals borrowing bandages from local vets and hospitals not being able to feed meat to their patients because they cannot pay the butcher’s bills is appalling. This government made a serious commitment to the Australian people, through the Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, that they would fix our hospitals. Nothing has improved, nothing has got any better, and we are still seeing that nothing is being done. As I say—and Senator Conroy might come to my assistance, because as he knows—on that side of the chamber they are constantly saying that all of those election commitments should be met. If that is true, and if they are absolutely, 100 per cent behind that, then they should be honouring the election commitment to fix our hospitals, because I can tell you that people in the North Coast seat of Richmond are saying to me: ‘Our hospital system is in disarray. We cannot get in.’ They have got a hospital up there with 30 new beds that they cannot utilise because there is no money to pay the staff. If that is an improvement, I am a monkey’s uncle, because I do not think it is.