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

In this budget the government committed to spending about $65 billion on health this year, which grew each and every year over the course of the next four years to about $74 billion by year four. As a country we spend about $140 billion per year on health, and that continues to grow as our population ages and as new medical technologies need to be adopted. We are spending more and more and more on health; that is absolutely the case. But it needs to be at a sustainable pace.

The Labor Party, when it was in government, received two independent reports, both of which told Labor that spending in its current form was unsustainable. So, whilst we grow health expenditure each and every year in this budget, we do not do it at the same rate—the same unsustainable rate—that Labor was proposing. In the health budget we will spend about $20 billion this year—

Ms King interjecting—

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