Page 3676 - Week 12 - Wednesday, 21 November 2007
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What Mr Stefaniak is arguing is all about the commonwealth; so it is all about the Liberal Party. The good times are a result of federal intervention and the bad times, what? This is a way, is it, of acknowledging that the previous government under Kate Carnell, Gary Humphries and Bill Stefaniak had absolutely no responsibility for four consecutive budget deficits over four years from 1995 to 2000 that accumulated deficits in excess of $800 million? So who is responsible for that? Are John Howard and the Liberal government responsible for that or are Bill Stefaniak and the Liberal Party here responsible for that?
You cannot have it both ways. You argue that in this century we have to be grateful for, thank and bow to the combined wisdom of John Howard, Peter Costello and Gary Humphries. But, of course, in the five dark years of mini recession, the slashings of tens of thousands of public service jobs, the pushing of tens of thousands of commonwealth public servants across Australia and up to 15,000 within the ACT onto the unemployed list are not a result of the election of a Liberal government in 1996. It is simply not possible, feasible or intellectually honest at any level to claim that, yes, the good times are a result of the enlightened policies of Howard, Costello and Humphries but the bad times are not.
We need to look at the commonwealth’s response to so many of those other issues that we face as a nation. The most important issue facing Australians and, indeed, Canberrans—and we are no different in this regard—is our capacity as an ageing nation, an ageing population with dramatic changes in the technology available, to fund our public health system. There is not a single piece of advice or evidence out that suggests the commonwealth government has been maintaining its obligations and the level of its expenditure on health services, particularly public health, within Australia. It has declined and declined significantly since 1996. The proportion of commonwealth support to public health within Australia, including within the ACT, has declined dramatically over the last 10 years. This is real. It is objective. The data is there. The information is in. The evidence is out that the Howard government has reduced support for public health across the board.
We see that expressed in the number of GPs that are available. We see it in the fact we cannot employ doctors. The federal government’s slashing of tertiary education and funding for universities and places within medical schools across the health professionals has led to a result which is particularly severe for the ACT where, of all places within the nation, we have the lowest number of GPs per capita and the lowest level of bulkbilling per capita. These are issues and responsibilities directly of a federal government.
Under this federal Liberal government, under John Howard, under Gary Humphries, we have seen an exacerbation of the situation within the ACT: not enough GPs to go around; they are at the lowest level. This is Gary Humphries’s legacy; this is the problem that we have in having a federal Liberal government and a federal Liberal representative—and one only—Gary Humphries, the great procrastinator. And let us not forget that he was known not so fondly throughout the ACT public service when he was a minister in this place as the great procrastinator because you could never get him to do anything; everybody knows that.
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