Climate change, global warming and cloud hugging, ‘the greatest moral challenges of our time’ just a few months ago have now been relegated to Kev’s ‘too-hard’ basket. Obviously Penny Wrong didn’t get it right! And Midnight Soil’s lead singer still can’t bring himself to say ‘sorry’ to the four families who lost their loved ones in Kev’s ill-fated Pink Batts rort that saw another $2 billion of taxpayers money washed down the gurgler.
Imagine the outcry if it had happened under John Howard’s watch! A vicious public campaign would have been funded by the chattering classes vowing to give up a latte a day and donating it to their new cause (no doubt they would have claimed it against their taxpayer funded job!).
To beat the heat generated against global warming Kev has changed tack and now wants to run our hospitals. He would like us to forget that the government who couldn’t put pink batts in ceilings now wants to fix up our health system by – wait for it – replacing a bureaucrat in Sydney with a bureaucrat in Canberra!
There is not doubt that our hospital system needs reform because it has been well and truly stuffed up by – wait for it – State Labor Government. So now they want to fix it by replacing State Labor Government management with Federal Labor Government Labor Government management!
It’s akin to allowing alcoholics to conduct stocktakes in your cellar!
Kev will fund this by withholding 30 per cent of GST from the States. In return for this Kev will fund
60 per cent of the costs for public hospital outpatient services and 100 per cent of the cost of state-run primary care services, such as hospital-in-the-home schemes, mother and baby clinics, and drug and alcohol and mental health services.
We are not talking about a simple pink batts scheme here. This will require a massive amount of complex policy detail. We are talking about the rules and regulations to make the system work and the co-ordinating mechanisms to bring it all together. It’s not as simple as a truck rocking up to your house with a load of pink batts.
But Kev has learned a lot from the pink batt rort and has decided to get a political headline and work out the policy later. The only positive so far is that he has borrowed Barry O’Farrell’s policy of introducing local networks to run local hospitals. All is has to do now is wait until O’Farrell releases his health policy which be geared towards empowering health professionals and not bureaucrats and ensuring patients are the beneficiaries, not Labor mates!
