Peter Dutton’s record as health minister a major weakness

Peter Dutton speaks in Geelong in 2013 during his time as Shadow Minister for Health and Ageing. Photo: Peter Ristevski

Peter Dutton’s biggest weakness is health policy. If the Liberal Party does not recognise that, its election chances will flatline and any new government will be dead on arrival.

This should come as no surprise to anyone, but the Liberals are sometimes so blinded by self-confidence that they miss the vital signs.

The Coalition has not recovered from Dutton’s 15 months as health minister. He didn’t just tarnish its record, he left massive cracks that threaten the government’s very survival.

At the last election, Bill Shorten and the Labor Party campaigned with great success on Medicare. Clearly, they overreached, and Malcolm Turnbull overreacted, but they based their “Mediscare” tactic on Dutton’s ill-fated pursuit of a GP co-payment (among other things).

As Turnbull later conceded, there was “fertile ground in which that grotesque lie could be sown”.

More recently, in the Longman by-election, Labor declared the Coalition had cut funding for hospitals while propping up banks and big business. Again, without going into detail, Labor was able to capitalise on a Dutton-era decision to ditch the hospital funding agreement and scale back the commonwealth contribution. Did anyone in the Liberal Party see a trend?

The legacy of Dutton’s time in the portfolio is the Medical Research Future Fund. But let’s be honest, the MRFF was part of an overarching policy to balance the budget, the sweet treat for a bitter pill. Once the MRFF reaches its $20 billion balance in 2021-22, Dutton’s health cuts will, on paper, be saving more than $2bn a year. The health sector remembers those cuts — one medical mag voted Dutton the worst health minister in 35 years — and Labor now won’t let anyone else forget.

The incumbent minister, Greg Hunt, has tried to mop up after the Coalition’s frenzied first term. He still has unfinished business in a public hospital funding agreement, health insurance reforms and a looming overhaul of GP payments. Yet now he apparently wants to be Dutton’s deputy instead.

It has taken the conservatives too long to realise that their perceived strengths in economic management and national security will not win every contest against a Labor Party seen to be better at service delivery. Whether a policy is right or wrong, politicians must know how to listen to voters and also how to speak to them.

Dutton, the health minister, repeatedly declared the health budget “unsustainable”. On Tuesday, Dutton, the leadership contender, declared it time to “invest record amounts into health”. Voters have every reason to be cynical and the health sector furious. Labor is ecstatic.

Turnbull might be a dead man walking, but this Dutton experiment doesn’t have a pulse.