Over the weekend, Labor leader Bill Shorten pledged $500 million to fix waiting times at hospital emergency departments:
Mr Shorten will declare that Australian doctors and nurses “deserve the best resources in the world” and must receive more commonwealth funding.
“This is what people pay their taxes to Canberra for. I don’t want to give it to multinationals in bigger loopholes, I want to build better hospitals and cut waiting times”…
“This is what our hard decisions have been about, delivering better services to every Australian.”
Here’s more via SBS News:
Emergency departments in hospitals around the country could get 650 more beds, 1800 more doctors or 3700 more nurses with Labor’s promise to slash waiting times.
After making health a major focus of its official campaign launch on Sunday, Labor has released individual state breakdowns for its plans to spend $500 million upgrading emergency departments and hiring more doctors and nurses to work in them.
What’s not mentioned is that Labor’s election policies will very likely make hospital waiting lists much worse.
A few weeks ago, Labor announced that it would uncap visas allowing migrants to bring their elderly parents into Australia. Demographers warned that there is already a backlog of nearly 100,000 applicants for permanent parental visas, which could immediately gain entry into Australia under Labor’s policy.
Further, every new migrant permanent resident would automatically be granted the right to bring in two elderly parents under Labor’s policy, thereby significantly raising numbers over time.
As we know, the elderly are by far the biggest users of health services in Australia. Therefore, Labor’s elderly migrant visas would dramatically lift demand for Australian hospital services, blowing-out waiting lists.
Opening the floodgates to elderly migrants will not only age Australia’s population, but also send queues for health services and aged care soaring. This will require far more funding than the “650 more beds, 1800 more doctors or 3700 more nurses” pledged by Bill Shorten to mitigate the fallout.
