Don Randall (Canning, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Local Government) Share this | Hansard source

I am very pleased to speak on the Fairer Private Health Insurance Incentives Bill 2011, the Fairer Private Health Insurance Incentives (Medicare Levy Surcharge) Bill 2011 and the Fairer Private Health Insurance Incentives (Medicare Levy Surcharge—Fringe Benefits) Bill 2011. What an Orwellian title. What is fairer about ripping money from people who want to invest in our health system and take the pressure off the public health system? It is not fair to the people who thought about it. It is not fair because it is a broken promise.

I will try not to go into all the detail as others have done but to introduce new material that reflects the views of my electorate. The effect of the bill is that, starting at $80,000 of income, people who are privately insured will not get the 30 per cent rebate. The income threshold is higher for couples. Those who do not privately insure and are above a certain income level will start paying a greater Medicare levy surcharge. We are into the class warfare. The Labor Party would say: 'These people do not vote for us, so who cares? We will go and belt them up, grab the money off them where we can and try to paint ourselves as the champions of people on lower incomes.' In Australia the fact is, if you go down the street now and get knocked over by a car or have some sort of accident, you will end up in an Australian hospital in an emergency centre and you will get treated for nothing if you are not self-insured. So much for this being about doing the right thing by those on lower incomes. They already get looked after because we have a very good health system as it stands now.

I was fortunate enough to join this parliament in 1996 and this was one of the great things that the Howard government introduced. A 30 per cent rebate, taken either as a tax return or as a drawdown, put incentive back into belonging to private health care. It was a great incentive for those who did not want to insure to do so. I think we used this example at the time: why should someone like Janet Holmes a Court's mother-in-law get free health care when she can afford to pay for herself? She will not insure because there is nothing in it for her. The incentive was always there with the rebate.

The sad part about this is that it is a broken election promise from a government that does not mind breaking promises almost on a daily basis now. They have no shame when it comes to rolling over on a commitment they have made. We have seen this with the carbon tax. We have seen what the Prime Minister did recently to the member for Denison on his pokies reform because she did not need his vote anymore. This is just cant and craven opportunism by the Labor Party. They have lost twice before but they suddenly decided they have a chance of getting it through. They do not need Mr Wilkie's vote because they got the former Speaker out of the chair so they could get an extra vote. We know how it is all done. It is very Machiavellian. That is why we are standing here today talking about these things.

People will drop their private health insurance. If anybody thinks that this is about the rich, they should think again. Pensioners in my electorate continue to struggle to pay for their private health care because they are high users of health care and they want a choice. That is the difference between the Labor Party and us: we believe in choice; they do not believe in choice. They believe one size fits all. The pensioners say, 'If I want some specialised attention, whether it is a hip or a knee, I can have the doctor of my choice and the specialist of my choice and I do not have to wait.' They say to me, 'Mr Randall, we are really doing it hard,' but they believe in private health care. This will not affect them, but the principle of private health care is being eroded in this whole context. Goodness knows where it will end up.

When I was a young boy my dad was not a wealthy person. He was a carpenter. We were a single-income family. My mother used to take her HBF stamp book into the newsagency and get it stamped. She wanted private health care for her four kids because she thought it would be better for us should we ever get sick. That is the mentality of people who want a choice. Here we are with this continual erosion after the government said in this place and elsewhere that they would not do it. The then health minister, Nicola Roxon, stated on 26 September:

… Federal Labor has made it crystal clear that we are committed to retaining all of the existing Private Health Insurance rebates, including the 30 per cent general rebate and the 35 and 40 per cent rebates for older Australians.

The Prime Minister repeated it in 2009. They have continually said it on the record. They have misled the Australian electorate. Just as they said there would be no carbon tax, they said there would be no eroding of the private health insurance rebate. What have they done? They have dishonestly turned around and done the opposite. And now, of course, they are in trouble—because they are a high-spending government. They are spending like drunken sailors, as the Treasurer would say. They cannot stop themselves from spending, so they have to get their money from somewhere. This is a form of reverse tax; they are actually taking the money off those who are privately insured, just as they are doing to the miners and to industry with the carbon tax. This is a high-taxing government that want to find money anywhere they can to prop up their bad behaviour. They want to rip money out of the pockets of Australian families and seniors to try and achieve this—just as we saw with the flood levy.

The government believe that the rich in Australia are people like a nurse and a policeman living together who earn enough money to get them to $160,000. There are many people in Australia on very low incomes, but middle-income Australia are the ones being burnt here—and they account for many of my constituents. They are the ones who are being attacked by this government. It is not just the wealthy that we keep hearing about, and the phobia they have with people like Gina Rinehart and Clive Palmer; this is attacking middle Australia, aspirational people who want to help themselves and obtain better opportunities for themselves and their families.

So we are not talking about the rich. This is ideological, as I said, because it removes choice. Do remember that this is the same Prime Minister that, in opposition, with Mark Latham as leader, came up with Medicare Gold—that whacky idea sold to her by somebody in the industry. She has continued to want to dismantle the pristine and magnificent health system we have had for years. When Hillary Clinton came to this country when her husband was the American President, she had a meeting with Michael Wooldridge and said, 'Can you tell us how you run this marvellous healthcare system? Running the public system in parallel with the private system—it is the envy of the world.' She had a meeting to try and find out how we do it. It was one of the healthcare marvels of the world. And here we are, in for the dismantling of it, because of an ideological class war battle of the Labor Party.

You can hear the Labor Party feigning concern about workers in this House on a daily basis. The best thing you can do for a person is give them a job. But what are we hearing about at the moment? Jobs are being lost in industries all around Australia. So much for the workers. The Labor Party are not really interested in the workers; they are just interested in their money, and taking it from them.

Why are we in this position today? Let's make the point about the Independents and the so-called Independents. We never expected the Greens to do anything. Mind you, dare I say it, the Greens today have got something for their vote—$160 million, so at least you have to give them something for their vote—but certainly not the member for Denison, not the member for Lyne and not the member for New England. They just roll over and have their tummies tickled, just fall straight into line. The members in those seats have very high numbers of end users of health care in their electorate, and those tens of thousands of people in their seats will judge them very harshly. But they got nothing for their vote; they prevaricate, they pretend that they might be hard to get and they run to the media and say, 'Oh, no, we're going to hold out.' But, no—unlike the Democrats of years ago, who were considered to be rented by the hour—these guys actually signed themselves up to be rented for the whole term of this parliament. They are just in lockstep with this government—no matter what they do, they will get their vote all the time, because they know, when they go to an election, they will get absolutely cleaned out, so they want to stay here as long as they can. So that is why they are doing this, against the will of their electorates, against the wishes of the middle-income earners of their electorates. They are willing to do this for current gain, but they will be judged very harshly when the opportunity arises.

Let us just go back a step and find out why this is silly and stupid. Dare I refer to an article in the Australianon 10 May 1995 entitled, 'Medicare levy to rise by about $30 a year'? It is all relative: $30 a year was a lot of money back in 1995. It says:

Labor ignored the private health system. Private health insurance membership fell from 63.7 per cent of the population in 1983 to below 34 per cent in 1996 …

I wonder what happened in 1996! The article continued:

At the same time private health insurance premiums rose by an average of 12 per cent every year. The decline in membership restricted choice and placed unsustainable pressure on our public health system.

So, at the moment, Australia is currently in the position where we have about 64 per cent of Australians who are in some way privately insured through a range of healthcare systems and we are heading south once this gets through.

Now, dare I say, one of the Labor champions of that time—the powerbroker, the man who used to tap Prime Ministers et cetera on the shoulder—Graham Richardson, was the Minister for Health. Let's see what Graham Richardson said. In 1993, Labor's health minister, Graham Richardson, warned that if private health insurance coverage were to drop below 40 per cent of the population, the entire health system would be in danger of collapse. When Labor left office the rate of coverage had plummeted to 34 per cent. Dare I say: deja vu! Here we go again: this is what we are heading for under this government.

Graham Richardson said on 28 November 1993:

We've always had the view that the private system had to coexist with the public system. If it doesn't, the public system can't cope.

I will end by going to an editorial—although I have so many emails from my electorate asking us to do what we can do to stop this reckless move by this reckless government—from the WeekendAustralianof 11-12 February this year:

Politically, the move will be felt in outer-metropolitan and provincial marginal seats—traditional Labor areas—where many tradies and small business operators earn more than the $83,000 for singles and $166,000 for families at which the rebate will be reduced. As with plain cigarette packages and more meddlesome anti-discrimination laws, striking a blow against private health insurance and individual choice smacks of a leftist mindset that some in the government would like to inflict on an unwilling electorate with vastly different priorities. Such ideology is especially out of touch from the concerns of aspirational voters with heavy mortgages. They and their families would resent being forced to queue for public hospital treatment and struggle to pay for services such as orthodontic care for their children, for example, if they were unable to maintain private cover.

That was a major Australian newspaper in its editorial belling this for what it really is. It is an absolute disgrace that we are in here today reaching this position when the government said it would not do it. This is not about trying to get stuck into the Gina Rineharts, as we keep hearing from the Treasurer in this place. This is about this side of the House standing up for middle Australia, standing up about the cost-of-living pressures they face on a daily basis, such as fuel at $1.50 a litre and all of those sorts of things that they are trying to deal with—feeding their kids, clothing their kids and insuring their houses. And what is happening? The government is going to make it harder for them to stay in the system. Of course it will be eroded. It will remove the amount of money that they are able to put into health care, because they just will not have it.

We heard from other members in this place that this is about mates and all that sort of stuff. This is not about mates on any side. This is about doing the right thing for a decent, and one of the most coveted, universal healthcare systems in the world. We do not want to go to the British system, where there is one size fits all. We do not want to go to a system where it is tattered and out of touch. In this country we have some of the best health professionals. These health professionals are currently affordable for those people who can afford to pay a little more to be privately insured. This is disgraceful legislation. It should not be in this House, because the government said that they would not bring it here. Yet here we are, standing here today facing another broken election promise, and all those on the other side should hang their heads in shame. (Time expired)

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