Time for a Pop Quiz (and why the National Hospital Plan needs to fail)

The relevance will become apparent, I promise.

Which Australian city has the largest population?
Which Australian city has the most electorates?
The governing party has, at every election since Federation, held a majority of seats in which Australian state?
Which state has the worst performing public hospital system in the land?

And now, to continue…

Rudd wants control of the hospitals and, although he’s conveniently forgotten, so too did Tony Abbott at one stage. I’m prepared to accept that were the Commonwealth to take control of the nation’s hospitals, there would be a substantial increase in hospital funding. The question is, “where will it be spent?”

The answer lies in the pop quiz. It will be in the state with the largest city, the most electorates, the one most important to any party’s chances to forming government and, coincidentally, with the greatest need. New South Wales.

The Founding Fathers were very clever in one respect, at least. They emulated the United States’ Senate to ensure that the smaller, less-populated states still had the same voice in our Federation as New South Wales, Victoria and, ever-increasingly, Queensland. They recognised that were the smaller states to be allocated representation based on population-share in both houses of the Parliament, the larger states would receive the lion’s share of the Commonwealth’s attention and, consequently, of the funds at its disposal.

The Senate’s role as a “States’ House” has diminished somewhat since then: not every Senator is a Harradine or a Xenophon, and party discipline more than parochial allegiance governs how our Senators will vote. We cannot count on that safeguard.

We rely on the annual dash-for-cash, when the state Premiers and territorian Chief-Ministers converge, kicking and screaming on Canberra, begging the Treasurer to loosen the purse strings and send a little more dosh their way.

And we know that when they come home, and hand the majority of the money they’ve just received to the Minister for Health, that it will be spent on our hospitals, clinics, dentists, physiotherapists, etc.


But imagine if it were Nicola Roxon (whom I have to admit I love and adore) deciding where that money went. Would it be on one of the four major hospitals in the Adelaide metropolitan area, where there’s a measly two-marginal seats that they have a hope of wrestling from the Libs? Or would it be in Sydney and Melbourne where combined there are more than 10 seats with a less than 5% margin?

South Australia, Western Australia, Tassie and the Territories cannot afford the National Hospital Plan.

For although I love Nicola Roxon, I’m betting that one of her skills as a politician is being good at maths.