Senator WEBBER (3:05 PM) —I move:

I specifically wanted to tackle the issue of the non-attendance of the Minister for Health and Ageing at the national health summit this past weekend. The minister is quoted in the Canberra Times on Saturday, 16 August as saying:

How outrageous and reprehensible a proposition it is that someone could seek to attend a national health summit and put forward their own case and speak in their own interests! Isn't that what a summit is meant to be all about? Isn't that the way summits are meant to work? Did the minister perhaps think that New South Wales should put forward the Commonwealth's position? Given that the minister did not attend then it may be right that the Australian people could be forgiven for thinking that New South Wales would put forward the Commonwealth's position.

The language the minister chooses to use also tells us about her frame of mind when tackling this issue. The minister uses some nice descriptive words about those attending the summit—words such as `hijacked'. There is nothing like resorting to the language of fear and personal attack when you are trying to get your message across! What an insult to the many organisations, professions and individuals and the states and territories that attended the national health summit. Here we have a minister saying that because New South Wales is going to advocate a position it is hijacking the summit. Everyone else who wants to attend the summit is therefore, by assumption, just there to behave in a craven way to the interests of New South Wales. I know that the New South Wales minister for health and, indeed, the Premier of New South Wales are very strong advocates for their state and the interests of the people of their state, but I did not realise they were capable of hijacking the entire national health summit.

Perhaps, though, what this really shows is the abject failure of leadership this minister is offering to the health industry throughout this country. Essentially, she is saying that unless she gets her own way she will not engage in any discussion with anyone else on any other issue. Unless you sign up to her one offer you cannot discuss any other reform agenda within the health industry. Basically, it is the good old-fashioned `sign or reject' scenario. You cannot debate the future delivery of health care services or debate a more collaborative approach until you fundamentally accept her offer. She will not even have a reasonable debate with the other ministers for health about ways of modifying or changing her offer. Instead, all of a sudden we have the position being put that she is the one who has made the big increase in health funding and no-one else has ever made any.

I do not know about the other states but in my state of Western Australia the state government delivered a nine per cent increase in health funding in this budget, and in the previous year there was a six per cent increase in health funding. That is a fairly good indication that there are going to be continued real increases in health funding in Western Australia. I accept that a lot of those increases had to recover from the complete sham and debacle under the Court government's delivery of health services so there is a lot of catch-up to take place, but they are significant real increases in health funding. Western Australia, like most other states, publish these great things called forward estimates, where they actually outline their future plans for health expenditure. Apparently, that is just far too hard for the minister for health.

The minister for health has suddenly discovered the reform agenda that state and territory ministers for health have been trying to get her to talk about for some time. But she only wants to talk about reform on her terms—and that is after you have locked yourself into a funding model and a reform agenda that I do not think is actually going to deal with things like the decline in bulk-billing. My colleague Senator Forshaw referred in question time today to figures that have shown the decline in bulk-billing in rural New South Wales. Those figures also show that people in towns where GPs do not bulk-bill use emergency departments 60 per cent more often than those in towns where doctors do bulk-bill. So unless the government does something about fixing this fundamental problem about the lack of access to bulk-billing services, it is just cost shifting onto the states. It will send all those people to the A and E departments, lock us into a funding model and then perhaps it might talk about reform if we are lucky. Then there is the question of access to GPs throughout Western Australia. The minister, in talking about her reform agenda, does not actually want to go to the heart of how the reform agenda is failing. (Time expired)