Ms MACKLIN —My question is to the Minister for Health and Aged Care. It is now 15 months since the minister called for statutory declarations to test the validity of the suspect MRI contracts and 10 months since the Health Insurance Commission started its investigation of allegations of backdating. Why is this investigation still incomplete? When will the minister table the promised report? As there is nothing in the Health Insurance Act which prevents the minister releasing the dates on which these contracts were signed, will he now disclose the dates or will he continue to keep them secret to cover up his own role in the budget leak?

Dr WOOLDRIDGE (Health and Aged Care) —At the outset, on Monday I tabled, along with a statutory declaration, a statement from my former staff member. That statement has now been provided to me in the form of a statutory declaration and I make it available to honourable members.

Let me start with the end of the question first. There has been absolutely no evidence whatsoever to confirm that there was a budget leak. What happened—and I was informed of this only on Monday—was that as early as February 1998 one of the companies that sells MRIs went around a conference in Sydney saying, `You'd better sign up now. It's coming in the budget and the government is going to have a supply measure.' I do not quite know how they knew this, as we first considered the supply measure in the first week of May, so there was considerable speculation in the industry that there would be a supply measure months ahead of when we did it. That is the first point.

The second point is that this was not a secret negotiation. The Australian Health Technology Advisory Committee said in October 1997 that the government should fund MRI. I had said publicly that we would try to find a way to fund MRI. I began formal negotiations with the Royal Australasian College of Radiologists in February 1998, as I recollect, with the express authority of the expenditure review committee to discuss with them the full possibilities of a budget measure. This was necessary because the whole budget measure led to savings of $80 million over a three-year period, and this could not be done without the cooperation of the College of Radiologists. So there was a great deal of speculation.

We did not make our decision to have a supply measure until the first week of May—I think I was first told about it on 5 May, so I do not concede there was a budget leak. I do concede that some people in the College of Radiologists knew about it. I do not know how those people behaved, and I do not know whether or not they ordered machines. If they did I think it is quite improper, but I do not want to speculate on that; they will be found out through the investigation process that we have put in place. I concede that the investigation has taken a long time. I have asked the Health Insurance Commission to finish it as fast as possible, but I have not attempted to interfere with the investigation because it does need to be at arms-length from government. I can assure the honourable member that, as soon as it becomes available, I will make the report itself available.

Finally, this whole measure has made a new imaging technology dramatically more available than it ever was under the Labor Party. When I came to government there was not one of these machines available anywhere in rural Australia. Today there are 19 of these machines in rural and non-metropolitan areas and we have an $80 million budget saving to boot.