The Senate Finance and Public Administration References Committee has called on the Gillard Government to restore hospital funding to all states and territories, not just Victoria.
This was just one of six recommendations of the Senate committee, which tabled its report into the implementation of the National Health Reform Agreement today.
Chair Senator Scott Ryan said some of the report’s findings were quite alarming. The people who will be worst off following Labor’s health cuts are rural and regional patients, where hospitals have less capacity to absorb funding cuts and will therefore need to cut more services.
The committee also heard that the Gillard Government’s assumption that the NSW and Queensland could “absorb” the funding reductions was nonsense. Witnesses told the committee that because of the different health system structures in different states, it will take longer for the impact of the cuts to be felt in NSW and Queensland, but patients, doctors and nurses will still be hurt.
It is for this reason the committee called on the Government to immediately reinstate funding cuts to all states and territories for the years 2011-12 and 2012-13.
“Evidence provided to the Senate Committee comprehensively demonstrated that the Gillard Government showed complete disregard for hospital patients and hospital staff when announcing retrospective funding cuts,” Senator Ryan said.
“Even Victoria, which will hopefully have some of its funding restored, has been left in limbo. While the Health Minister Tanya Plibersek has reversed some Victorian funding cuts, no details of how this will be done have been provided. In the meantime, misleading advertisements have appeared in newspapers, but no money has arrived in our hospitals.”
“Looking ahead, the committee recommended that governments commit to not undertaking any retrospective funding cuts. You can’t take back a hip replacement and you can’t put a child’s tonsils back in – once funding is committed and delivered, government has no place in taking it back,” Senator Ryan said.