Page 3287 - Week 12 - Thursday, 19 November 1992
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public patients to hospital care; joint development of a Medicare hospital patients' charter detailing what people are entitled to expect from a public hospital service; an improved waiting list for elective surgery management; and structural reform within hospital management to provide better planned budgeting and deliver hospital services.
The Medicare hospital patients' charter, in particular, will be important in setting out the fundamental rights of people, and for our purposes here, the people of the ACT, as patients in public hospitals. People thus will be told, as their right, the name of the principal health professional looking after them, the reason for their treatment and, where elective surgery is concerned, where they are on the waiting list. These ought to be matters upon which we can all agree. They should be loudly applauded by those opposite, who are always claiming to be the defenders of individual liberty, but we can expect the same carping criticism of a system that works.
Frankly, that does not concern me. As I said before, 70 per cent of Australians like Medicare. The Liberals' opposition to it is, quite simply, one of Labor's greatest electoral assets. For them, it is a moneymaking enterprise for well-heeled supporters of the Liberal Party. That is how they regard it. A health care policy should say something about structural reform of the hospital system - something that is high on Labor's agenda. The Liberals do not mention it in their "frightpack" policy. The Liberals are fond of their free enterprise panacea. Behind the Liberal claptrap, they know that there is no simple solution to delivering better and better health care. The health care sector of the national economy is about $28 billion and employs about 7 per cent of the Australian labour force. The Liberal policy is just a simplistic slogan: Give more money to private health care. Quite frankly, it is facile and meaningless.
In conclusion, it is incumbent upon me, and indeed upon the members of this Assembly, to recognise that what the Liberals are proposing to replace Medicare they are not laying on the table. They can put down, as Jeff Kennett did, documents saying, "This is where we go; this is what we are going to do". Once the election is over, as we have seen with their industrial relations policy, they throw it out the window and go for the "cut 'em off at the legs" approach. That has underpinned the Liberals' policy over the last three years, since Dr John and his mates have got control of the Liberal Party. That is what the people of Canberra can expect under these people. It is no wonder that they will be so resoundingly rejected - and hopefully ejected - come the election in the middle of next year.
MR DE DOMENICO (3.49): Madam Speaker, let us now get back to the matter of public importance, which is the importance of the Medicare agreement to the health of the people of Canberra. I start by saying that the Federal budget was a big step forward in health care policy, not because it offered major reforms but because the Federal Government has admitted for the first time that it has a Medicare problem. I repeat that: The Federal Government has admitted for the first time that it has a Medicare problem. The Government had been in denial mode on Medicare for several years and, as any therapist will tell you, the first and most difficult step is to admit the problem. The Federal Government finally admitted that it had a Medicare problem.
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