Sue Boyce (Queensland, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I can do nothing but reiterate the comments of Senator Fierravanti-Wells and Senator Siewert about the bizarre and quixotic way the government has gone about attempting to bring this legislation in. After lunch today, this legislation was not on the list, yet Minister Roxon has been lecturing the coalition for months now about how we needed to get our act together to get this legislation through. In terms of getting one’s act together, I do not think I have seen any thing more bizarre than today’s activities. The government did not have this on the list; now the government has it on the list. As I understand it, the identifier system that this legislation will support is supposed to start operating on 1 July. It cannot do that without this legislation. We are now informed that the House of Representatives, where the government has the majority, is about to stop sitting, or has stopped sitting, and therefore this legislation cannot go back to them to be passed in time for it to start on 1 July. I have subsequently been told by Senator Siewert that this legislation is now not supposed to start until 1 October. Can we get this right? I continue to be bemused by Minister Roxon’s pathetic efforts to get legislation through and her attempts to blame us for it. I would like to read to the Senate a line from an article by Karen Dearne in the Australian on 1 June. She said:

One month out from the start of the Rudd government’s mandatory Healthcare Identifiers regime, Medicare is yet to sign a contract for service delivery.

They had not signed up the service deliverer a month out from when they said the only thing stopping this from happening was the opposition’s opposition. What complete and utter garbage! In any other organisation the current health minister would be out of a job in 10 seconds. She is the implementer from hell. Given the record of this government, she will probably get a promotion. Implementation is certainly not high on their agenda, and the way that they have gone about this is even more hopeless.