Miss JACKIE KELLY (9:43 AM) —The 1993-98 Medicare agreement saw $25 billion spent on hospitals. In the forward estimates, under Labor over the next five-year period only $27.3 billion would have been spent on hospitals unless the previous government had increased taxes such as wholesale taxes and income taxes which hit the people out in Lindsay.

Under our proposed Medicare agreement $30.3 billion over the next five years will be spent. That is 6.9 per cent real growth that will be built into those Medicare agreements at a time when our government has got inflation down at the lowest levels, unemployment trending down and getting back to the 1990 levels, and interest rates coming down as well. We have a stable economic platform, we are offering them 6.9 per cent real growth in funding and the states—particularly Refshauge in New South Wales—want an extra $1.1 billion a year. They want to tax the taxpayers of the Commonwealth more money in order to provide for their slip-ups.

Given that New South Wales cannot organise much in the way of its budget, it has basically imposed land taxes, pokie taxes and bed taxes in order to cover its expenditure. It has also done an enormous amount of cost shifting. Even in my own hospital in the Nepean area there have been complaints of admitting patients from accident and emergency as private patients when they have asked to be admitted as public patients, and thereby shifting the costs onto the Commonwealth.

Not only that; if Refshauge got the extra money, I doubt very much whether it would be spent on hospitals. There is every reason to expect that Mr Egan rather than Dr Refshauge would be the beneficiary of any extra Commonwealth funding. To date, none of it has gone into my electorate in Lindsay. In fact, we only get half the amount of dollars per capita at Nepean compared to those inner city residents using inner city hospitals. None of the extra funding to hospitals has come to my area and yet they are getting more Commonwealth funding every year and have done so through the entire time of the Bob Carr government.

Instead of fixing this issue, Bob Carr is busy imposing penalties on owners of cats and dogs, penalties that are more severe than we give to people who carry knives. He is busy getting $200 million for better sewerage into Sydney's harbour rather than looking at our Warragamba Dam and trying to fix that problem. He is looking for $200 million to bring down a building in the inner city. All he gives us is a glossy brochure telling us how to live in a flood plain, a siren on Lapstone Hill and an evacuation plan along roads which are a disgrace. (Time expired)