Mr TAYLOR (Hume) (16:10): In 20 years of working in the private sector before coming into parliament, one of the things I learned very early on is that an effective service has to be a sustainable one. Those opposite promised the Australian people a lot. But the question we have all got to ask ourselves is, 'Is any of it sustainable?' I have learnt over the last little while that they have got a couple of tricks. Trick No. 1 is to make sure you promise lots out beyond the four-year estimates, because no-one makes you accountable for that. Trick No. 2 is to put in place taxes that do not generate any revenue, because you can promise the future without ever actually delivering it.

I was interested in particular as to how sustainable their healthcare policies were. I went to the Parliamentary Budget Office, who looked back at the Labor years and the rate of growth of spending under the Labor. I discovered that public hospital spending growth was at six per cent a year. Bear in mind that GDP is significantly lower than that. When we go to the MBS, it is nine per cent a year. The PBS—which was their best performer—was at about GDP growth, which is five per cent a year. The total is much faster than GDP. A simple mathematical fact is that when you spend at a rate faster than GDP, then your debt and deficit grows and it is no longer sustainable.

I asked myself, 'What is it about the Labor Party that means that they have this kind of spending growth?' Bear the comparison in mind that our spending growth is about one per cent a year. I thought I would turn to the ANAO, because it is a pretty trusted and independent auditor of government spending. I looked through their reports and I discovered some crackers. The first was on GP super clinics. It turns out that the Labor Party promised 75 GP super clinics over two rounds.

Mr Tehan: How many?

Mr TAYLOR: Seventy-five over two rounds. In classic bureaucratic understatement, the ANAO said that:

The time taken from the execution of funding agreements to the completion of clinics has varied considerably …

It turns out that over a third were subject to non-competitive practices. The ANAO made clear that there were very significant risks in this. Even more interesting, it turns out that 66 per cent of the funding promised in the 2007 election went to marginal electorates and there were only 31 per cent of electorates that were marginal. By complete coincidence, it turns out that these GP super clinics—which never actually happened—went to marginal seats. What a program that was!

I thought I would turn to another one: the ANAO had a look quite recently the Fifth Community Pharmacy Agreement. This was negotiated under the last government. It was a $15.4 billion agreement. Again, in characteristic bureaucratic understatement, the ANAO said that overall the administration of the agreement:

… has been mixed, and there is a limited basis for assessing the extent to which the 5CPA has met its key objectives …

That is because there were none! There were no objectives. When you are Labor, you do not bother with objectives. You might be held to account! In other words, if you do not know where you are going, any road will get you there. According to the ANAO, a number of objectives were only partly realised and there have been shortcomings in key aspects. Labor promised that there would be $1 billion in savings, but the ANAO was disappointed to find that it was closer to $0.4 billion dollars due to shortcomings in estimation methodology.

Then I turned to another one: e-health. How did that go? A billion dollars was spent and there were no results. It turns out that for a billion dollars we got 4,000 records. That is $250,000 a record. I wish that I had been paid for creating records; I would be much richer than I am today.

Even worse, as University of Western Australia software academic David Glance has told us, even if the government had reached its targets, it would have been a meaningless gesture. Those opposite love meaningless gestures. The vast majority of those who signed up, if they ever get to logging in—and I have to say that I never logged in—will be greeted with an empty record. The thing did not work. Given the lack of active participation on the part of GPs, as well as the lack of public hospital systems to integrate with the system, there is little evidence to suggest that anything is going on. There is nothing going on there. In the MBS the ANAO found similar levels of waste under Labor. Contrast this with our wonderful Minister for Health. She is moving forward in containing spending growth and delivering improving health outcomes, because only we understand what it takes to provide sustainable services.

The DEPUTY SPEAKER ( Mr Craig Kelly ): The time for the discussion has concluded.