Crikey

The House of Representatives Standing Committee on Health and Ageing called its report tabled in the Parliament last December The Blame Game: Report on the inquiry into health funding and Kevin Rudd has clearly read it.

Ending the blame game has entered his every day lexicon and much of the material in the Labor health policy he unveiled yesterday comes from the committee report.

Given that the Committee was chaired by the Liberal Member for Fairfax Alexander Somlyay it will be difficult for Health Minister Tony Abbott to be too critical of the Rudd proposals.

Difficult too because the inspiration for the findings was a speech Mr Abbott himself delivered to the Centre for Independent Studies policy makers’ forum on 20 September 2006. The Committee used an extract from that speech at the very beginning of the Overview of its report:

… what I’ve described as the dogs’ breakfast of divided responsibilities which bedevils our health system or our health systems. As many of you who have been in public, private and other health institutions would know, it’s possible on a moment by moment, hour by hour basis to shift from federally funded but privately delivered services to federal and state funded but publicly delivered services to federally funded but state delivered services to federally subsidised and also privately funded services.

The sentiment that will surely haunt the Government in reacting to the Rudd Labor plan for aggressively trying to stop the blame game is that Mr Abbott quite recently broke off negotiations with state health ministers about new funding arrangements for public hospitals.

The states wanted to know what funds they will have when the current Federal-State agreement ends next 30 June, but Mr Abbott fobbed them off with the excuse that the more important thing for him to do with his time was to try and win the next election.