Health policy ‘suffering from high turnover of ministers’

Tony Bartone, president of the Australian Medical Association, has said that the federal government’s leadership tensions have undermined the continuity and stability of national health policy.

The country has had three health ministers in five years and could have had a fourth if Greg Hunt (above left) had not been reappointed to the cabinet role by prime minister Scott Morrison.

“That would have been a disaster, especially with an election no more than nine months away—maybe even less,” Bartone (above right) wrote in an AMA editorial.