Labor is once again attempting to reinvent the 2016 Mediscare campaign.
Of all the services provided through the health portfolio, Labor has chosen their biggest stuff up – elective surgery.
The facts are that the Hodgman Liberal Government has reduced waiting lists that blew out under the previous government and reversed the devastating cuts instigated by the secretive health budget cuts committee, which was chaired by Rebecca White when in government.
We are spending more money on elective surgery than ever before, and as a result, we’re seeing record low waiting lists.
In the upcoming budget, we’re allocating an additional $20 million to elective surgery to continue on the improvements we’ve already made.
We are successfully reducing elective surgery waiting times after years of neglect at the hands of Labor and the Greens, when people were forced to wait up to 10 years for their surgery.
The extra $20 million comes on top of the additional $76 million we delivered for elective surgery in our last term of Government. Unbelievably, Rebecca White opposed this funding.
She has since ditched the health portfolio and is now pretending she cares about people who, under the previous Labor-Green government, could have been waiting up to 4000 days for surgery.
Together with our federal Liberal colleagues, we are investing record funds into the Tasmanian health system.
Commonwealth funding for public hospitals in our state is increasing substantially, enabling us to employ more doctors, more nurses and fund more services to support patients.
Labor needs to stop playing politics with health to scare Tasmanians.
The fact is that under the Liberals, Tasmania’s waiting list is smaller and waiting times are shorter.
