Rachel Siewert (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate take note of the answer given by the Assistant Minister for Health (Senator Nash) to a question without notice asked by Senator Siewert today relating to funding for services for Indigenous Australians.

For a start, it is quite obvious from the minister's response—although she tried not to say it—that, no, the government will not be returning the funding that they cut. The position that she took was, 'We are putting all this money in.' Yes, that is great, but there is still a cut. There is still $168 million being taken out of the health budget. There is still $534 million being taken out of Aboriginal programs. You can talk all you like about the money you are investing, and that is great—it is helping—but there has been a cut. I will talk about this in more detail when we address the Closing the Gap annual report.

I want to refer to the Close the Gap Campaign Steering Committee's progress report. When you read that report, the point that comes out really clearly in that we need to make a long-term sustained commitment to funding, because the target we are aiming for is to close the gap in life expectancy by 2030. Therefore we need to make sure that we provide that funding. But, no, the government have cut funding. They have taken $168 million out of the health budget. That will have an impact on our ability to close the gap.

When I asked about the co-payment, the minister was talking extensively about the fact that they have consulted. Well, I have spoken to a large number of Aboriginal medical services, and guess what? No, they have not been consulted about the impact of the co-payment on their clients. No, they have not been consulted by the government on the co-payment. We did hear, through the Senate inquiries into inequality and into the impact of the cuts, that the co-payment will have an impact on the clients of Aboriginal medical services. But that was through the Senate inquiry process; it was not through the government's consultation process. So for the government to say they have been consulting Aboriginal medical services about the impact of the co-payment on their clients is in fact a nonsense.

In terms of the minister making any long-term commitment to long-term funding for Aboriginal medical services, again she would not answer that question. She said, 'Yes, we are talking about it.' With the current turmoil surrounding funding for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander programs, including health programs, Aboriginal medical services are deeply concerned about the future of their services. Apparently they have been able to engage with the government on that. The minister did say that they have been engaging with the sector, but in fact they have not been able to resolve that. They were given a 12-month contract but they still have no guarantee that they will have long-term funding.

That takes me back to the issue I started with—that is, it is quite obvious that, if we are going to close the gap by 2030, we need sustained long-term investment in health programs. But here we are, stumbling at the first hurdle, when we are not even prepared to make sure that we are committed to long-term funding of Aboriginal medical services. We absolutely need to increase our investment in primary health services, but AMSs also work with other programs. While we have got turmoil in the grants program from the Department of Social Services and absolute turmoil with what is happening with the Indigenous Advancement Strategy—where, on the current timetable, organisations are not even going to know the outcomes of that until the end of March—those funding decisions also impact on the ability of Aboriginal medical services to deliver ongoing health services to clients and, in particular, to address the issues around poor chronic health outcomes. The Closing the Gap reports particularly highlight that chronic health outcomes are going backwards.

How can Aboriginal medical services plan for the long-term if they do not know what their funding is going to be from year to year? How can they keep top-quality medical specialists if they do not know what their funding is going to be? The money that has been taken out of their budget—$168 million—is a huge whack to delivering Aboriginal medical health services. It should be reversed. Any commitment by the government is undermined by their failure to do that.

Question agreed to.