Mathias Cormann (WA, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

Mr Kevin Rudd, the then Leader of the Opposition, said before the 2007 election that he had a plan to fix public hospitals. After the election—no plan. Instead what we got was an 18-month review through the National Health and Hospitals Reform Commission to try to come up with a plan to fix public hospitals, as Kevin Rudd, then Prime Minister of Australia, would say. Did they implement that plan? No. They had a review into the review but the plan by the National Health and Hospitals Reform Commission is gathering dust to this day. When all of the options had run out and finally they were approaching the next election, when clearly they had not delivered and we had all talk and no action, what happened? They thought, ‘We’ll pick a fight with the states. We’re going to go for a crash grab at the expense of the states,’. They were casting around for some more cash. ‘We’ll try to get one-third of the GST revenue from the states and territories. We’re going to take $200 billion away from the states over the next 10 years to 2020.’ What did they give the states and territories in exchange? Between now and 2020, $15.6 billion. That is the deal that Prime Minister Rudd, Treasurer Wayne Swan and health minister Nicola Roxon tried to implement in the lead-up to the last election and that is the deal that Julia Gillard, our Prime Minister, is now walking away from.

The states clearly have realised that this is a bad deal for the states and a bad deal for patients. That is why they are all walking away from it. That is why not a single state Labor government has signed onto it. That is why not a single state Labor government, 10 months after the April 2010 COAG meeting, has signed on the dotted line to hand over their share of the GST to the federal government. The Prime Minister will now try and blame it on the coalition governments in Victoria and Western Australia. Nothing could be further from the truth. It is very important for people to understand that not one single state or territory Labor government has signed up to this deal.

Of course the government are all over the place. Last night government senators from the economics committee tabled a report in this chamber recommending that the Senate pass legislation to take away a third of the GST from the states and territories, while the Prime Minister is out there saying, ‘The deal is dead. We’re not going to proceed with taking the GST away from the states and territories.’ Of course the reason the deal is dead is that, when people like Premier Bligh in Queensland and Chief Minister Jon Stanhope in the ACT looked at what they were asked to hand over to the Commonwealth, they realised that it was a bad deal for their respective states. Queensland is to hand over 40 to 44 per cent of their GST revenue to the Commonwealth, the ACT 50 to 51 per cent of their GST revenue to the Commonwealth and Western Australia—of course, if Western Australia had agreed to be part of it—60 to 63 per cent of their GST revenue to supposedly fund this deal.

How is shifting money from the states and territories to the Commonwealth ‘health reform’? How is shifting money from here to there actually going to make any tangible, beneficial outcome for patients? Of course it does not. I believe that, when state Labor premiers and chief ministers decided to agree in principle—probably precipitously at the April 2010 COAG meeting—they did not have the specific estimates in front of them as to how this particular deal was actually going to impact on their state budgets. The reason not one of them has signed up to this day and the reason they are now all seeking cover behind Premier Barnett and Premier Baillieu—and are quite happy for them to take the blame for the deal falling apart—is they are quite comfortable with it not going ahead. Of course I bet that the Prime Minister has been told privately that state Labor leaders are no longer comfortable to go ahead with this either.

This government has been a failure in health. They came up with a smoke-and-mirrors cash grab which was never health reform. It was always just about centralising revenue in Canberra at the expense of the states without actually making any of the hard decisions.