Page 871 - Week 03 - Wednesday, 2 April 2008
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safety, electronic conveyancing, upstream petroleum regulation, maritime safety, wine labelling, directors’ liabilities and financial service delivery.
MR SPEAKER: Supplementary question, Ms MacDonald?
MS MacDONALD: Yes, thank you, Mr Speaker. Can the Chief Minister tell the Assembly how the additional funding that COAG agreed will be provided under the health care agreement will serve Canberra’s health care system and hospitals?
MR STANHOPE: I must say that the issue that captured much public attention in relation to the COAG meeting and its outcomes was a decision by the commonwealth government for the immediate allocation of an additional $1 billion to relieve the pressure on public hospitals. The $1 billion is made up of the indexation of the previous commonwealth allocation for 2007-08, plus a further $500 million in additional money. Overall, that meant for the year an increase in commonwealth funding for public hospitals of 10.2 per cent.
The exact amount of the funding to be received by each jurisdiction is yet to be provided, but on the basis of the previous formula it can be expected that the minimum amount the ACT will receive would buy in the order of 1,400 cost-weighted separations, allow for an increase of approximately 15 per cent in elective surgery or, just by way of example, slash our elective surgery waiting lists by approximately 25 per cent in one year.
Why this particular announcement was so important was that it is the first time for a decade that the commonwealth government has increased, above a standard indexation, funding for public health in Australia. It has taken a decade. In fact, it is the first time since the election of the Howard government over a decade ago that the commonwealth has increased proportionately funding for public health in Australia. It is interesting and a very clear signal of what a change a change of government federally has made for Australia—that here we have, within four months, a government coming into power, recognising the crisis in public health care or funding around Australia, the issue that is the greatest drain on state and territory funding, and it being addressed in the first COAG meeting of the year by a reversal of a decade-long trend under John Howard and the Liberal Party.
This is a really significant decision that was taken at this meeting: for the first time in a decade, after 10 years of Liberal government, a government has come to power that has said, “Yes, we recognise that public health is the number one issue for the people of Australia and, yes, we recognise that it is time for a commonwealth government to begin again to accept its level of responsibility for the funding of the health care needs of the people of Australia.”
It is interesting that in the space of that 10 years the commonwealth proportion of funding for public hospitals and public health has declined from a rough fifty-fifty split when John Howard came to power to a roughly national sixty-forty split of expenditure, 60 per cent being picked up by the states and territories and 40 per cent by the commonwealth. That is remarkable when one thinks of it and when one thinks that for every state and territory the number one budget item is, of course, health. It is
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