Judith Adams (WA, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to take note of answers by the Minister representing the Minister for Health and Ageing, Senator Ludwig, on health reform. It is interesting to note that ever since former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and the Minister for Health and Ageing, Nicola Roxon, forced their historic health reform on the states it has been unravelling. Within days the then Prime Minister had to admit that, under his plans for activity based funding for all hospitals, hundreds of smaller mostly rural and regional hospitals would have to close. Having been involved with hospital boards in rural areas for a long time, I could not see where this Prime Minister or the health minister were going with their health plan. It really was not going to make sense practically. Within days Mr Rudd had to change the formula and promise that no hospital would close.

Then before the ink was dry on the COAG health reform agreement, secretly and quietly the Rudd government disposed of the national funding authority, one of the key parts of his reforms to provide transparency in health funding. This was raised very often in the lead-up to the election and it just disappeared because the states said it was not needed. Next, the diabetes plan was withdrawn. Doctors refused to have anything to do with it because of lack of consultation. Then we found that the local hospital networks were no such thing. Under the Rudd-Gillard reforms, local does not mean local, and I could speak for a great length of time on that position.

Then we had the Medicare locals. Those were supposedly to coordinate primary care. Leaked documents from New South Wales and Victoria show that even those Labor state governments had no idea what these bodies were meant to do, how they would operate and who would form them. Just a month into the new year before the historic Rudd-Gillard reforms are even a year old, key parts of them are being abandoned by the Prime Minister, Julia Gillard. At Monday’s COAG she is likely to dump the so-called reform plan for the Commonwealth to be the dominant funder of public hospitals. We hear that it will now be 40 per cent Commonwealth, 60 per cent states. I feel, too, that Prime Minister Gillard is likely to run away from the clawback of the GST from the states and this, of course, has been led very strongly by Premier Barnett from my home state of Western Australia.

Prime Minister Gillard is also likely to dump the four-hour waiting time targets for emergency departments—and who knows what else may disappear from Labor’s historic reforms. The slogan of federally funded and locally controlled that went with these so-called reforms is a joke. Ms Julia Gillard got rid of Mr Rudd because the Rudd-Gillard government had lost its way and the Rudd-less Gillard government has not found its way as far as health is concerned. Prime Minister Gillard is so desperate to give the perception that she can get a health reform deal that she will abandon any parts of the reform agreement necessary to get the premiers to sign up. We were really led to believe earlier on that the premiers had signed up to the GST and then we find later that this had not happened. So this is a very weak Prime Minister preparing to do a huge backflip. No-one knows what she stands for. She went to the last election saying the GST clawback by the Commonwealth to fund public hospitals was absolutely necessary. She gave a rock solid commitment to the GST arrangement. Now she is walking away from it. Almost a year after the agreement was done, no-one has signed off on its core principles.

Another bungle earlier this year which caused huge numbers of constituents to call or email my office was the health registration bungle. We had numerous health professionals—doctors, nurses and allied health people—not being able to register. The Australian Health Care Reform Alliance, which includes 50 organisations, had 70 people at their recent conference. Out of that summit came an agreement that there can be no real reform of the health system without primary care reform—that is, greater emphasis on early intervention and prevention and greater equity of access to doctors and other primary care providers with less overall emphasis being given to hospitals. Coming from a rural area, I think that is an essential component for the practicality of these health reforms. The reforms are about people. They are about patients. They are about access to health services.

Question agreed to.