Topic: Federal Government. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese made the announcement on the likely final sitting fortnight before a federal election. AAP: Michael Gorton. Public hospitals will receive additional funding in a single-year deal, as the government runs out of time to negotiate a five-funding deal.
Longer-term funding arrangements remain contingent on states and territories progressing reforms to the NDIS. But Health Minister Mark Butler said the government had run out of time to renew the five-year funding deal between the Commonwealth and the states before the next federal election. This infuriates Australians when all they want is to make sure they don't spend hours ramped in an ambulance or waiting in an overcrowded emergency department. The Albanese government is working with the states and territories to develop a "foundational supports" system for some people with disability after reforms to the National Disability Insurance Scheme were passed last year to slow the growing costs of the scheme.
The states and territories have an agreement with the Commonwealth where major hospitals are funded according to how many and what type of patients they have treated in the previous year β and that is adjusted for cost increases such as wage growth, rent hikes, equipment and electricity. But the money is conditional. The Commonwealth puts the brakes on any large cost increases by constraining annual growth to 6. The health minister said the top-up was a concession the current arrangement was not fit for purpose and flagged increasing the growth cap in a future deal with the states and territories.
Meanwhile, the prime minister used Wednesday's announcement to focus Labor's attack on the Coalition over health care, saying Labor created Medicare and would protect it. Mr Albanese is seeking to make health care a central issue in the coming federal election, and has repeatedly claimed it would not be safe from cuts under Mr Dutton. Seeking to shut down that line of attack, Mr Dutton vowed last month that funding for Medicare would not go backwards under a Coalition government.
Shadow Health Minister Anne Ruston on Wednesday said the Coalition supported the additional funding for hospitals but took aim at the lack of a new five-year agreement, describing the boost as a "one-year funding bandaid". We acknowledge Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as the First Australians and Traditional Custodians of the lands where we live, learn, and work.
