Peter Dutton (Dickson, Liberal Party, Minister for Health) Share this | Hansard source

Why is it that Labor presided over ripping money out of frontline health services and putting it into bureaucracies? Because of the union bosses. What have we done in relation to this most recent budget? I can tell you what we have done in the national context in terms of state-by-state budget funding for public hospitals. New South Wales it increases by 7.2 per cent from 2013-14 to 2014-15. It is 7.3 per cent in Victoria, 12.8 per cent in Queensland, 13.6 per cent in WA and seven per cent in Tasmania. In Tasmania the budget shows, in black and white, that it will go up by 15 per cent. If you listen to the Labor Party you would think that we had cut hospital funding. Next year and the year after in New South Wales it is an increase of 9.8 per cent and 8.7 per cent. If you look at Queensland over the years of this budget, there is an increase of 36.6 per cent over those four years. In New South Wales it is 36.7 per cent; in Tasmania, 30.8 per cent; and in WA, it is a 44 per cent increase in hospital funding over the course of the next four years. So do not listen to this nonsense from the Labor Party. These people are playing up to the union bosses who are visiting the parliament today—nothing more, nothing less.

All I want to do is put the facts on the table. We increase hospital funding in each and every year under this budget. We put it on a sustainable path, because Labor racked up debt. They pretended they could give everything to everybody for free. Well, do you know what? The hangover of the party now needs to be dealt with. People in their household budgets know that you can only spend for so long more than what you earn. People in small or large business now that you can only spend more than what you earn for so long before the banks move in to take over.

My colleagues from Tasmania—who are particularly passionate about health and have seen Labor preside over the worst health mismanagement at a state level over the course of the last six years; exactly the reason Labor was swept from power in Tasmania—passed on a very interesting statistic to me before. And that is that this interest bill that we have been left with from the Labor Party is $1 billion a month. Without any changes it grows to $2.8 billion within 10 years. This is per month. That is money that we are borrowing to pay the interest bill. Imagine if you were running your household like that. If you had to borrow money each month to pay off the mortgage, people would go broke pretty quickly. The country is in exactly the same position if we do not put in place remedial action. What do you get for $1 billion a month? As we heard before from my colleagues from Tasmania, you could employ 10,000 nurses a year. That is 10,000 nurses a year for a single Labor interest bill in a month.

So I say to the nurses in the gallery, 'If you wonder why we are having to take action to repair Labor's damage over the course of the last six years, it is because of the debt that they have racked up.' We have provided extra support for scholarships in relation to nurses and allied health care professionals in this budget. We provide $96 million for bowel cancer screening—early detection is very important in bowel cancer. We provide that support. We provide extra funding in addition to the fact that we can build a $20-billion medical research fund. Why? Because we know that for every dollar that we spend in medical research, $2.17 is returned. Why do we know that? Because of the independent report that Prime Minister Gillard commissioned that came back to the Labor government to say that the health system in its current form is unsustainable and we should be spending more in the areas of prevention, which we do in this budget. We spend more in relation to bowel cancer screening, as I say, but in many other areas as well. We spend more in medical research because, as a country, we punch above our weight. We have world-class medical researchers that other countries are desperate to poach. But we keep them here and we will find better techniques to care for patients as well as the cures for diseases of the brain, for cancers and other issues which will overtake us in decades and centuries to come if we do not do the research today—in a similar vein to the way in which we had to do research around penicillin and other discoveries that came from this country and others over the previous decades.

We are putting money into that space because it will save money long term in the health system. That is the advice that was given to the Labor government. The problem is that Labor mismanaged so poorly. The internal fighting that really engulfed Labor over the course of the last six years is still there. We saw the member for Sydney in the opposition leader's chair today absolutely determined to knock off Bill Shorten in the same way that Julia Gillard was determined to knock off Kevin Rudd. Mark my words, these people, when you scratch beneath the surface, are as bad today as they were six years ago. That is the reason they were never able to manage health properly—because they did not have an eye on patients and nurses and doctors. This government will make sure that we take care of our nurses, that we take care of our doctors, that we take care of our patients and we do that because we increased funding. We take it away from those bureaucratic structures and we put it back into front-line services.

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