PM: This is an important reform for the nation's health and hospital system and where the rubber hits the road is for hospitals like this one, the Royal Brisbane and Women's Hospital here in Queensland.
The Royal Brisbane is a hospital which has, as I'm advised, nearly a thousand beds and I've been speaking to a lot of folk this morning and what they say is, they could do with more.
In the past, the Australian Government's relationship to the hospitals of Australia has been this. We provided 35 per cent of the recurrent costs of hospitals but you know something? We haven't provided anything, really, for the training and research function of hospitals and we've not provided anything when it comes to the capital needs of hospitals, the equipment, the buildings.
How does this therefore change? For the future, the Australian Government would take on the dominant share of the recurrent costs of hospitals like the Royal. The dominant share of the costs of the training and research function in these hospitals and the dominant share of the capital needs of these hospitals, buildings and equipment.
That makes a huge difference for the future for major hospitals like the Royal Brisbane and Women's Hospital.
Let me go to a practical example within the hospital and I was speaking before to a number of people on the nursing staff and other members of staff who told me about the particular needs in day surgery.
I said very simply, what do you need more? The answer for them was, they needed more space. Well, what does this mean in terms of a practical difference on the ground? It means that under this plan of ours, the Australian Government would, for the first time, take on a dominant funding role for the expansion of day surgery here at the Royal Brisbane.
That is the difference. In the past we didn't contribute a dollar. That is the key difference.
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