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Background In recent years, Australian state and territory governments have reviewed and restructured the health systems they lead and regulate. This paper examines the outcomes of the most recent official published reviews of systems and structures; identifies the common themes; and addresses two questions: what problems are being addressed? And how would we know if the changes were successful? Results In all the broad, systemic reviews, the main health system problems identified were money, hospital utilisation and a weak primary health care system. The solutions are various, but there is a common trend towards centralisation of governance, often at state health authority level, and stronger accountability measures. Other common themes are hospital substitution (services to avoid the need for admission); calls for cooperation across the Commonwealth:state divide, or for its abolition; and the expected range of current efficiency and effectiveness measures (eg amalgamate pathology and support services) and ideas in good currency (eg call centres). The top-down nature of the public review process is noted, along with the political nature of the immediate catalysts for calling on a review. Conclusion The long-standing tension between the pull to centralisation of authority and the need for innovation in care models is heightened by recent changes, which may be counterproductive in an era dominated by the burden of chronic disease. I argue that the current reforms will not succeed in achieving the stated goals unless they make a difference for people with chronic illness. And if this is correct, the most useful focus for evaluation of the success of the reforms may be their impact on the system's ability to develop and deliver better models of care for this growing group of patients.

Objectives: The need to improve access to good health care for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people has been the subject of policy debate for decades, but progress is hampered by complex policy and administrative arrangements and lack of clarity about the responsibilities of governments. This study aimed to identify the current legal basis of those responsibilities and define options available to Australian governments to enact enduring responsibility for Aboriginal health care.

Copyright the Authors, Journal compilation copyright AHHA 2016. Published under a CC-BY-NC-ND licence: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/deed.en_US). ; Objective Over past decades, Australian and Canadian Indigenous primary healthcare policies have focused on supporting community controlled Indigenous health organisations. After more than 20 years of sustained effort, over 89% of eligible communities in Canada are currently engaged in the planning, management and provision of community controlled health services. In Australia, policy commitment to community control has also been in place for more than 25 years, but implementation has been complicated by unrealistic timelines, underdeveloped change management processes, inflexible funding agreements and distrust. This paper discusses the lessons from the Canadian experience to inform the continuing efforts to achieve the implementation of community control in Australia. Methods We reviewed Canadian policy and evaluation grey literature documents, and assessed lessons and recommendations for relevance to the Australian context. Results Our analysis yielded three broad lessons. First, implementing community control takes time. It took Canada 20 years to achieve 89% implementation. To succeed, Australia will need to make a firm long term commitment to this objective. Second, implementing community control is complex. Communities require adequate resources to support change management. And third, accountability frameworks must be tailored to the Indigenous primary health care context to be meaningful. Conclusions We conclude that although the Canadian experience is based on a different context, the processes and tools created to implement community control in Canada can help inform the Australian context. What is known about the topic? Although Australia has promoted Indigenous control over primary healthcare (PHC) services, implementation remains incomplete. Enduring barriers to the transfer of PHC services to community control have not been addressed in the largely sporadic attention to this challenge to date, despite significant recent efforts in some jurisdictions. What does this paper add? The Canadian experience indicates that transferring PHC from government to community ownership requires sustained commitment, adequate resourcing of the change process and the development of a meaningful accountability framework tailored to the sector. What are the implications for practitioners? Policy makers in Australia will need to attend to reform in contractual arrangements (towards pooled or bundled funding), adopt a long-term vision for transfer and find ways to harmonise the roles of federal and state governments. The arrangements achieved in some communities in the Australian Coordinated Care Trials (and still in place) provide a model.

© 2015 The Authors. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution‐NonCommercial‐NoDerivatives License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non‐commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made. ; Objectives: The need to improve access to good health care for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people has been the subject of policy debate for decades, but progress is hampered by complex policy and administrative arrangements and lack of clarity about the responsibilities of governments. This study aimed to identify the current legal basis of those responsibilities and define options available to Australian governments to enact enduring responsibility for Aboriginal health care. Methods: This study used a framework for public health law research and conducted a mapping study to examine the current legal underpinnings for stewardship and governance for Aboriginal health and health care. More than 200 pieces of health legislation were analysed in the context of the common and statutory law and health policy goals. Results: Very little specific recognition of the needs of Aboriginal people was found, and nothing that creates responsibility for stewardship and governance. The continuing absence of a legislative framework to address and protect Aboriginal health can be traced back to the founding doctrine of terra nullius (unoccupied land). Conclusions: We considered the results applying both a human rights perspective and the perspective of therapeutic jurisprudence. We suggest that national law for health stewardship would provide a strong foundation for progress, and should itself be based on recognition of Australia's First Peoples in the Australian Constitution, as is currently proposed.

Abortion policy is still contentious in many parts of the world, and periodically it emerges to dominate health policy debates. This paper examines one such debate in Australia centering on research findings by a New Zealand research group, Fergusson, Horwood & Ridder, published in early 2006. The debate highlighted the difficulty for researchers when their work is released in a heightened political context. We argue that the authors made a logical error in constructing their analysis and interpreting their data, and are therefore not justified in making policy claims for their work. The paper received significant public attention, and may have influenced the public policy position of a major professional body. Deeply held views on all sides of the abortion debate are unlikely to be reconciled, but if policy is to be informed by research, findings must be based on sound science.

In Australia and other industrialised countries, governments contract with the non‐government sector for the provision of primary health care to indigenous peoples. Australian governments have developed policies and funding programs to support this health sector, but the current arrangements are unduly complex and fragmented. The results of our study show that the complex contractual environment for Aboriginal Community‐Controlled Health Services (ACCHSs) and their funders is an unintended but inevitable result of a quasi‐classical approach to contracts applied by multiple funders. The analysis in this article highlights potential policy and program changes that could improve the effectiveness of funding and accountability arrangements, based on the use of an alliance contracting model, better performance indicators and greater clarity in the relative roles of national and jurisdictional governments.