So the health reform process has come down to a good old-fashioned Commonwealth-State bunfight over money. Now there’s a surprise. The people may be different, but it’s all rather reminiscent of the Premiers’ Conferences of old. We could almost be watching footage of Neville Wran walking up the steps of Old Parliament House, perhaps having jetted back to Canberra after Treasurer John Howard admitted there was still some extra money left over that he hadn’t given the states, or Bob Hawke chipping “the new boy” Nick Greiner for being a smartarse.
Ah, yes, for those of you too young to remember, we used to go through this rubbish every year. All the posturing and chest-beating and theatrics, before the PM, the Treasurer and the Premiers would go into the Cabinet Room and thrash out a deal over money. The same talking points from back then about “constructive debate” and “frank discussions” are still in use, although Joh Bjelke-Petersen always had his own particular method of expressing himself.
As the Premier with the lowest levels of support, both generally and on her Government’s handling of health, Kristina Keneally was not in a particularly strong position to stand on the complex principle of GST allocation. She duly caved this morning, leaving John Brumby and Colin Barnett to front the cameras as the last of the recalcitrants. For the sake of appearances, they insisted a deal was in reach if everyone compromised just a little bit more. By ‘everyone’, of course, they meant the Commonwealth.
Like revenge, it’s best to get your spinning in first, particularly if things look like they could go pear-shaped.
The Prime Minister’s idea of compromise has been to write out more cheques, billions of dollars worth, locking the Commonwealth in to substantial funding commitments far into the future. Most of this money will go into a health system that is functioning perfectly well, and into urban and suburban hospitals that might have a bad reputation with voters but which work very well be world standards. The health services available to urban Australians will improve still further compared to what’s available to the real priority users of the health system, indigenous people and rural and regional communities.
At least much of the $1.2b of (yet more) additional funding announced yesterday will be aimed at increasing capacity for mental health services, the third of the real health priorities that have been overlooked in the whole debate.
But otherwise, Rudd’s munificence is another version of middle-class welfare, further improving the free, high-quality health services urban Australians get for free. Whoever wins out of this, taxpayers will be the losers.
This is a political pantomime. Rudd anticipated spending all this money from the beginning and just needed to give the premiers an appearance of some small victories.
Perhaps he should call the bluff of the Victorian and WA premiers and send them back with no extra health spending and no plan for the future. The ensuing political firestorm in their home states would have them back in a fortnight begging to sign up.
It’s not welfare though it is hospitals, doctors, beds and so on that are required for the taxpayers, all of them who use public services.
Middle-class Welfare you goose is giving money to the rich while letting the poor live on the street.-
Australian’s have always wanted more money to be spent on health services.
No-one loses, all the tax money is the same anyway.
@shepherdmarilyn
You’ve been such a leftist for so long, you don’t even know what middle-class welfare is amy more.
Australia slipped into a welfare state mentality by degrees of Fabianism. Like boiling a frog, you heat the water slowly.
Up until Gough Whitlam’s Medibank, and then its reinstatement as Medicare, the middle class paid its own way in health care. After means testing was removed, the only way to cap costs was to ration the availability of services.
That’s what caused our public hospital system to become delapidated. Just like Uganda, you gander.
Real middle-class welfare is the government’s – read taxpayer’s – subsidies paid to private schools and the rebate paid to those who have private health cover. This amounts to many tens of billions of dollars paid over the last decade.
Rudd has done little, and in the case of schools nothing, to stem this legacy of John Howard’s wilful belligerence in undermining the nation’s ethos of a ‘fair go’.
Isn’t Rudd trying to appear as though he is eager to improve the public health system in this instance? The concept of middle-class welfare doesn’t hinge on an urban/regional/rural divide. It is about giving more to those in the community, urban, regional and rural, who are already advantaged.
Yeah I thought middle class welfare was a strange discription – I would say its of no comparsison to the money for health funds, private schools, family payments etc
Public health is one area govt should be increasing spending although a gap payment wouldn’t hurt for patients of public hospitals