Don Farrell (SA, Australian Labor Party, Parliamentary Secretary for Sustainability and Urban Water) Share this | Hansard source

The National Health Reform Amendment (National Health Performance Authority) Bill 2011 establishes a key element of the Australian government's health reform agenda—the National Health Performance Authority. The National Health Performance Authority will act as a watchdog over the performance of both public and private hospitals, local hospital networks and Medicare Locals. It will regularly report comparative information on the performance of these bodies and will give the public information in respect of consistently poor performance. Performance monitoring will support the improvement of healthcare delivery, safety and quality by all of these services. Poor performance will be identified to allow for remediation and superior performance will be identified to allow the dissemination of best practice approaches.

The establishment of the authority is a key part of the National Health Reform Agreement signed by all states and territories this month. It is a bill that has been endorsed by committee inquiries in both the House and the Senate. The government will be moving one small amendment during the committee stage, which will address issues to allow flexibility in the appointment of people with experience in the health field to the board. I understand that the opposition will be moving an amendment to introduce a review of the performance of the authority and, if passed, they will be supporting the passage of the legislation. On that basis the government is happy to also support the opposition's amendment.

I thank the Greens for their support of this legislation and for their commitment to transparency in our health system and the opposition for finally coming to the party to support these reforms. Unlike the opposition the government pursues the tough reforms particularly when they involve more transparency for the Australian public. Standing on the shoulders of MySchool, MyHospitals and our FOI reforms, this authority will deliver for Australians unprecedented levels of nationally comparable information. It will also be the watchdog to detect poor performance in our public and private hospitals and primary care sector. I thank the members for their contributions, the officials for their hard work and the states for their cooperation with these reforms.

Question agreed to.

Bill read a second time.