Fed: Dutton says coalition health policy on the way next year

AAP General News (Australia)
12-22-2009
Fed: Dutton says coalition health policy on the way next year

CANBERRA, Dec 22 AAP - Opposition health spokesman Peter Dutton won't say if the coalition
will push for a referendum on federal and state health funding.

Mr Dutton said all would be revealed in the coalition's health policy to be launched next year.

He said two years after promising to reform federal and state health arrangements,
Labor had yet to put a plan on the table.

"What I don't support is a centralisation of power, of further swelling of bureaucracies,"

he told Fairfax radio.

"That has been Labor's answer, just to put more health bureaucrats on. I want to see
more doctors and nurses, not more spin doctors.

"If we can deliver a model where we return some of the power and the decision-making
capacity to doctors and nurses, if we can find a way to do that and take away the power
from these faceless bureaucrats hiding in offices in buildings towering above the Sydney
CBD, we would get better health outcomes."

Fairfax newspapers reported on Tuesday that Opposition Leader Tony Abbott would go
on the offensive and challenge Prime Minister Kevin Rudd on health care by pushing for
a referendum on health funding reform.

Mr Dutton said Mr Rudd was experiencing the same frustrations as former prime minister
John Howard did, and Mr Abbott when he was federal health minister.

He said health funding arrangements with the states were a dog's breakfast, with the
division of funding responsibility between the states and the commonwealth.

"That necessarily means that one shifts blame onto the other," he told Fairfax radio.

"So when Mr Rudd promised at the last election that he would fix health and fix the
hospitals by mid-2009, I think he believed he could cut a deal with this state Labor premiers
and that they would find a way forward.

"But I think over the last two years, he has discovered that it is not quite as easy
as he thought from opposition."

AAP mb/jl

KEYWORD: REFERENDUM DUTTON

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