PM: It's great to be here in the Shoalhaven and it's great to be here to talk about the need to deliver better cancer services to people in rural and regional Australia, and that's what this is all about. It's about partnering with the local community, partnering with local hospitals to ensure that we deliver better cancer services and better health and hospital services to the good people of this region.
Here in the Shoalhaven local people have raised, I'm advised, something in the order of a million dollars to support the work of an integrated cancer care centre here in Nowra. I would commend them for their work. This is an extraordinary fundraising effort on their behalf.
We, the Australian Government, are confirming today an investment in total of $33.8 million for a new, purpose-built regional cancer centre here at the Shoalhaven District Memorial Hospital. We're doing so in partnership with the New South Wales Government. They're investing $10 million of that amount and I acknowledge that and thank them for it.
The purposes that this will be used for are as follows: to purchase one linear accelerator; two radiotherapy bunkers; eight additional chemotherapy chairs; medical diagnostic equipment including a CT scanner; and a 10-room patient and carer accommodation facility.
The whole point of these integrated cancer care centres at a regional level is to make sure that people suffering from cancer have the best possible range of services available to them locally. Wherever I have travelled in regional Australia in the last several weeks what I have seen is the same story: people saying 'dealing with a cancer diagnosis is bad enough. Having to travel hours and hours and hours, and in parts of regional Queensland days and days, to the capital city to get the proper range of cancer services is just too much to bear.'
That is why this is part of a total investment of more than half a billion dollars by Australian Government in integrated regional cancer centres right across Australia - 22 announcements of the type that we are making here in the Shoalhaven today.
So, this is an investment on our part in order to make a difference to these lives, of these good people in this region. I've met many of them this morning. Each has a story to tell; each of those stories is very personal, but each of those stories has profound consequences for the community as well.
So, this is a good thing to do, to support not just the fundraising efforts of local people, but to deliver decent services to those suffering from this terrible disease.
I just conclude by saying this: cancer, we have about 100,000 new diagnoses of cancer in Australia each year. We have about 32,000, 33,000 of those in New South Wales - but here is the terrible statistic: with certain major cancers, if you are in regional and rural Australia, your survival rates within the first five years of diagnosis are one-third of those who live in the major cities. That's just wrong, it shouldn't be the case and we've got to change if for the future.
That's why we also need a new National Health and Hospitals Network funded nationally, run locally with the Australian Government being the dominant funder for the health and hospital system for the future. It's part of delivering more hospital beds, more doctors, more nurses and more basic services like cancer services across the country, and that's the core of the reform plan that we're putting to the nation.
Now, I must just ask, Frank - do you want to add to what I've just said?
MINISTER SARTOR: Well, only to commend the Government and the Prime Minister on this cancer centre roll out. It's absolutely fundamental, it's an important thing to do. The biggest gains in cancer are bringing best practice to regional Australia, to everybody in Australia, and that's what they're doing and we're very supportive and I thank the Prime Minister for this initiative.
PM: Good. Over to you, folks, if you have any questions.
JOURNALIST: Mr Rudd, you just spoke about local funding. Would an area like this, in your opinion, make an ideal model for provision of local funding, just to see how it would work on the ground?
PM: Our plan for a new National Health and Hospitals Network is to be, as it says here, funded nationally and run locally and that means - funded - the Australian Government, for the first time in history, being the dominant funder of the hospital system of Australia, and secondly run locally by local hospital networks with us making payments direct to those networks.
Now, your question goes to this particular region as a candidate for becoming such a hospital network. I'm sure that the good local folk in this part of the world will sort out what's best for them. The worst thing you can do is have someone from Canberra dictating where your lines should stop and start. What constitutes your best local community of interest, does it include this hospital, the two surrounding hospitals, does it include Wollongong as well - these are decisions best, frankly, developed locally, but once you've shaped those decisions in partnership with the state government, can I say we, the Australian Government, are in the business of providing funding to these networks directly so that local clinicians can make the best decisions locally on the use of those funds to deliver better health services, better hospital services to local people.
JOURNALIST: Does that mean that the local health service would be no longer - in this case, the South East Area Sydney health service?
PM: That's a matter for local people and local clinicians to resolve with those who will be determining the boundaries of these communities of interest in the future. I've said many times in the past - there's no news in this - I think in the state of New South Wales the health areas are too vast. They are too huge. When you talk about communities of interest, for example, up in northern New South Wales the strong feedback I had there, for example, from the people at Port Macquarie, was there are grave difficulties in making sure that their voices were properly heard within a region so vast.
I can't comment on this particular region and I don't have the region before me, but my general view is we need communities of interest served by local hospital networks which are local, where people have a sense of direct ownership and also still large enough, with enough critical mass, to provide the proper range of health and hospital services.
There's a balance in doing that, and that's the balance we need to get right for the future.
JOURNALIST: Are you prepared to make more concessions to the states as you meet with the premiers today and have your meetings tomorrow in order to get your plan through?
PM: Let me just say one or two things about the meeting of COAG. You see, after 12 years of waiting, tomorrow presents the premiers and the chief ministers with a great opportunity to take a huge step forward in the delivery of better health and hospital services for all Australians, and I think that's what the Australian people are saying they want, but to deliver better health and hospital services we need first to reform the system to get rid of duplication and waste, and then secondly grow the system by greater investment in beds, doctors and nurses.
Now, some of the premiers - Mr Abbott, too - seem to be saying the current system is fine, just provide another blank cheque. I'm not prepared to do that. The Australian Government's not prepared to do that. We need more money coupled with more reform to deliver a better hospitals network for the future, not simply more blank cheques.
Let me just be very clear about that: what we need for the future is more reform and more money in order to deliver a better hospital system for the future, not simply more blank cheques. That, in its essence, is the Australian Government's position, and what does our plan provide for?
Our plan, in a nutshell, provides funding for another 6,000 or so doctors; provides funding for 95 percent of elective surgery to be done on time; provides funding for reducing waits at accident and emergency to four hours. These are very practical reforms. That's why we've put forward this plan and we intend to work with the premiers and the chief ministers through the detail of this when we gather together in Canberra tonight and tomorrow and it'll be a tough negotiation, but I am absolutely determined that we deliver better health and better hospital services for all Australians. I was elected to do that. I take that responsibility seriously. I intend to get on with it.
JOURNALIST: Can I just take it back to a local level again - the local federal electorate council for the seat of Gilmore is meeting this afternoon to possibly select its own candidate. Are you disappointed, with an election potentially so close, that the Party has left it so late to find a candidate?
PM: Well, the term, the electoral term of this Government runs through until the end of this year. Let's be very clear about that. Secondly, as far as Party preselections are concerned I'm sure all those preselection processes are well in hand and I'm confident that we're going to have a very good candidate here in Gilmore because we have a very good message for the people of the Shoalhaven and the wider region, and it's about our plan for enhancing hospital and health services, and we've detailed that on cancer services today; the fact that we're investing something close to $100 million in upgrades to local schools, primary schools getting new, state-of-the-art language centres, science centres, multipurpose halls; on top of that, libraries, resource centres, as well as the investments, of course, that we have made more broadly in other areas as well, including, I'm advised, in the whole area of rural and clinical training schools as well.
I think we've got a good message, a very, very practical message for the people of this area. Our interest is to make a difference to the lives of working families, pensioners, carers here in the Shoalhaven. I'm sure we're going to have a good candidate who will deliver that message because the record of what we have done is actually a good record.
JOURNALIST: Selected by the branches or Selected by head office or you?
PM: Preselection processes are always a deep mystery within the Australian Labor Party-
JOURNALIST: -And outside it.
PM: -so they will work their way through. I'm confident that we'll have a very good candidate who will make a very good representative for the good people of this area and be able to explain very clearly a strong record of achievement for this area on the part of the Australian Government. We have taken the interests of this region very seriously. The fact that we've got hundreds of millions of dollars of investment going in here in the biggest school modernisation program this region has ever seen, government schools, non-government schools, as well as what we've just done here at the Shoalhaven District Hospital for cancer services - this is a good record of local achievement.
JOURNALIST: Is it disappointing that you that you come here today, you make this major announcement which was certainly welcomed by the whole community, you don't have a candidate to make the most of that good feeling that's generated today?
PM: You know something? I have a very practical view of the people of Australia, including the people of the Shoalhaven. They'll make a judgement on the basis of what we have done, what our record is, including the funding that we've provided for critical services such as those for cancer. They'll make their judgement-
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If someone came down here and made a thousand speeches about the need for enhanced cancer services, well, that's all political cannon fodder, that's terrific - but you know something? What's more important-
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