HEALTH BUDGET

Mr MARSHALL (Norwood—Deputy Leader of the Opposition) (15:10): My question is to the Minister for Health and Ageing. Can the minister explain to the house when he first became aware of federal plans to recall $31 million of federal health funding and what representations he has made to federal health minister Plibersek to ensure this does not happen? Last week, the federal government announced that it would be taking back $31 million of health funding that was previously given to the state over two years. On Friday, the minister met with his other state counterparts and minister Plibersek to discuss the issue.

The Hon. J.D. HILL (Kaurna—Minister for Health and Ageing, Minister for Mental Health and Substance Abuse, Minister for the Arts) (15:10): I thank the member for his question. I congratulate him on his initial question as shadow minister for health. I cannot recall exactly when I found out about it: it was in the last couple of weeks. I was with all state and federal ministers last week in Perth. We had a long discussion about the impacts of the federal government's changes and made it plain to the minister that we found them unacceptable. In fact, we passed a motion of all state ministers, Labor and Liberal, who agreed on a form of words. If I can remember them, roughly they were along these lines.

We acknowledged that the decision was not made by the federal minister but, rather, it was made by Treasury; we objected to the retrospective nature of the decision (for South Australia, I think it means about $11 million will be taken out of last year's budget, but a certain amount will come out of this year's budget); and we raised the question about the formula that was used because we believed it was a different interpretation of the information. Also, we objected to the lack of consultation with us over the measures and, finally, we asked our Treasury officials and the commonwealth Treasury officials to reconsider. That was agreed by all of the state ministers and we made it very clear that we wanted it to be reviewed.

The federal minister made the observation that all the states had signed up to the arrangements which had been put in place; that is, the states had all agreed with the federal government that they had the right to retrospectively alter figures based on latest information. So that is where we are at, and it is really up to the Treasury people to work out whether anything can be done. I did ask whether or not this had occurred in the past and there was a view that perhaps it occurred once previously, but there was a lack of information around that.