Steven Ciobo (Moncrieff, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I am pleased to stand up on behalf of my constituents to oppose Labor's plans to remove the private health insurance rebate. The Fairer Private Health Insurance Incentives Bill 2011, which has been argued by both sides for some time now, demonstrates the ongoing way in which the Labor Party, the government of this nation, continues its full-frontal assault on ordinary Australians. The great shame about this piece of legislation—which is coming before the chamber for the third time—is that it is yet another example of the Labor Party saying one thing before an election and doing something quite to the contrary after the election.

We know that the Prime Minister has form in this area. We know that the Prime Minister makes all sorts of commitments to all sorts of people and then walks away from them. Springing to mind, of course, is the Prime Minister's most significant betrayal of the Australian people, when she gave the commitment not to introduce a carbon tax. As Prime Minister of the nation, she walked away from that commitment and now she is introducing a carbon tax. The Prime Minister also gave a commitment not to alter the 30 per cent rebate on private health insurance, but, again, the Prime Minister has walked away from that commitment. The Prime Minister also gave a commitment to the Independent member for Denison. She actually had a written agreement with the Independent member for Denison indicating that she would move for mandatory precommitment for poker machines. Now the Prime Minister has walked away from that agreement.

And who could forget—certainly the minister at the table, Mr Bowen, the Minister for Immigration and Citizenship, would not forget—that the Prime Minister committed to the former Prime Minister, the member for Griffith, not to challenge for the leadership and said that he had her 100 per cent support. We all know how that turned out. The betrayal of the Australian people with this legislation that is before the House is no different to the betrayal by the Prime Minister of the member for Griffith.

I am certainly pleased to stand here and put unequivocally on the record my complete and total opposition to these pieces of legislation, which go a very long way towards completely ripping out the incentive that Australians have to take out private medical insurance. I want to talk about the application of this legislation to my electorate of Moncrieff. The Gold Coast is a city that is really doing it tough at the moment. We are reliant on two key industries: the tourism industry and the construction industry. Both of these industries have been severely and adversely affected by the downturn that is taking place globally. Of course the pain is being further compounded by the rapid appreciation of the Australian dollar. In fact, the appreciation of the Australian dollar is a consequence of Labor's heavy debt binge. It is not the sole reason, but Labor's addiction to spending is part of the reason why interest rates have been forced to go up and are more likely to go up than if Labor had got the budget under control.

That notwithstanding, the pain felt by Gold Coasters is very real. They have seen asset deflation, they are seeing increasingly rising costs of living and many of them are simply struggling to make ends meet. Despite this fact, 59.8 per cent of my constituents have private health insurance. Approximately 53,556 out of 70,726 have private health insurance. In my electorate, some 49,312 voters, which represents 55 per cent, had hospital treatment insurance, and approximately 53,147 voters, which is around 59.3 per cent, had general treatment insurance. In other words, significant numbers of my constituents have private health insurance. They have it because it is a value proposition.

It is a value proposition because, despite the fact that the public system on the Gold Coast is staffed by very good doctors, by very good nurses, by people absolutely committed to quality public health care, it is forced to endure less than great—let us put it that way—resources from the Queensland state Labor government. We have a hospital on the Gold Coast that simply is not up to the task when it comes to meeting the needs of Australia's sixth largest city. We have a hospital that already struggles with demand exceeding their ability to supply health services. I want to stress again that these are very committed workers in the public health system, but they are let down by a lack of commitment by the Queensland state Labor government and they are let down by a lack of resourcing. Now, unfortunately, they are also going to be let down by the federal Labor government, which is walking away from yet another commitment.

An article in today's Gold Coast Bulletin about a pensioner missing out on surgery states:

The 73-year-old woman was to have her gall bladder removed at Robina Hospital on Thursday when staff told her the surgery had to be cancelled because of emergency cases and a lack of beds.

The woman, who did not want to be named, arrived at hospital at 7.30 am and was prepared for surgery but it was cancelled and she was discharged at 10.30 am.

A senior doctor told the Bulletin the Gold Coast Health District was on a "code yellow" on Thursday, which meant there were no beds and "services were overwhelmed".

Yesterday district chief executive Dr Adrian Nowitzke denied the hospital was on a code yellow and would not comment on how frequently the code occurred.

However the senior doctor said the code was experienced sometimes three times a week on the Coast.

So we see from this most recent news article that the Gold Coast is a city that already has a public health system that is groaning under the stress of a rapidly growing population and a lack of resourcing.

Under Labor's you-beaut brilliant plan that is before the chamber tonight, they are simply going to push more people from the auspices of private health insurance into the public system. You are left to wonder whether this government really has any idea about the repercussions of the decisions it takes. This decision is being undertaken in an attempt to claw back money. This is the federal Labor government's policy initiative to try to do something to reign in their debt and deficit.

The problem is that these measures would not be necessary if there had not been such rampant and reckless public spending and waste by this government over the past three years. When you think about the billions of dollars that have been wasted on pink batts and on overpriced school hall buildings—many of them charged at two or three times what it actually would have cost to build similar infrastructure—and when you consider the money wasted on the solar program and the blow-outs on Fuelwatch and GroceryWatch and those kinds of initiatives, you realise that the Australian people have a very genuine reason to be angry with the Gillard Labor government. The Gillard Labor government wasted all this money—$900 cheques to dead people, blow-outs in the cost of pink batts due to putting them in and then taking them out again—and now the Australian people are forced to pay the bill through higher insurance premiums as a direct consequence of the bills currently before the chamber.

I stand alongside Gold Coast families. I stand alongside Gold Coast families who know that they do not deserve this. As a coalition we were committed to making it easier for people to have choice when it came to private health insurance. It was the coalition government that introduced the Medicare safety net. It was the coalition government that introduced the 30 per cent rebate. We did these things because we were able to manage Australia's economy well. We paid off all of Labor's debt last time. We got unemployment down. We were able to reinvest the dividend of good economic management socially to make sure that Gold Coast families and all families across Australia were in a better position to enjoy the benefits of solid economic stewardship. And now they have the contrast. They have the contrast of what happens when you have a government that has $50 billion deficits, that blows $136 billion of public net debt and that is borrowing in excess of $100 million a day to feed its spending addiction. Now they face the consequences of a Labor Party that is simply out of control when it comes to fiscal discipline. Now they pay the price of seeing premium increases of 13, 26 and 43 per cent on their private medical insurance as a direct consequence of Labor now attempting to do something about its level of debt and deficit. The most concerning part of all this, besides the betrayal of the Australian people and despite the fact that the Prime Minister said that she would not introduce this policy but now is doing so, is that the government is not being upfront and frank with Australians and Gold Coasters about the impact of this policy. The government owned insurer, Medibank Private, has predicted that 37,000 of its members alone will drop their cover and 92,500 will downgrade their level of cover. When you consider that the minister has claimed that the impact of this policy will be that only about 27,000 people across the sector will drop their cover you start to realise that the government is not being frank or fair dinkum with the Australian people and with Gold Coasters.

Deloitte analysis of the changes that Labor is implementing shows that in the first year 175,000 people are expected to withdraw from private hospital cover and a further 583,000 are expected to downgrade. Over the next five years, it is expected that 1.6 million Australians will drop their cover and 4.3 million Australians will downgrade. For the Gold Coast—Australia's sixth-largest city and a city whose public hospital system, doctors say, experiences a code yellow three times a week—we have the you-beaut brilliance of the Australian Labor Party trying to claw back money through policy changes that would be unnecessary had it not spent so much money to begin with. It is going to drive tens of thousands of people in my city alone from the private system to the public system. We can only speculate what that will mean for a system that is already groaning under the weight of excess demand. I know what it will mean. It will mean that people will lose their lives. It will mean that people who need to have access to life-saving surgery will not get it. It will mean that people who could have had surgery earlier, had there been more people in the private system, will be shunted further down the waiting list as other cases go before them. The very real consequence of these changes is that people will lose their lives. They will no longer be able to avail themselves of elective surgery because they will have had to make hard decisions about what they are going to pay for out of a very finite amount of income.

Gold Coasters are doing it tough. This is not about the elites; this is not about the rich. The Labor Party likes to play those class warfare games because it suits their arguments. This is about ordinary working families in suburbs like Ashmore and Nerang in my electorate. It is about people who are struggling already in suburbs like Southport, Mermaid and Miami. They are struggling to meet the rising costs of living and are now going to be forced to choose between maintaining their private health insurance and paying an extra 10, 15, 20 or 30 per cent more and letting their cover lapse and going back onto the public system. It is a disgrace that the Labor Party puts people in this predicament. It should not have wasted so much money that it now needs to try to claw it back by repealing good coalition initiatives that created the social dividend that flowed under the coalition as a result of strong economic stewardship.

I stand alongside the 59 per cent of voters, some 53,500 people, in my electorate who have private medical cover and who remain steadfastly opposed to this Labor initiative. They are not all millionaires; they are not all exceptionally wealthy. They are just ordinary Gold Coast families who are going to have to pay more now because of this Labor Party policy. It is a great shame that they are forced to be in that situation because this government does not have the wherewithal to get its debt and deficit under control. This government is seeing a billion-dollar blowout in the cost of border protection, it has seen a billion-dollar blowout in the pink batts program, it has seen massive blowouts in the school halls and solar programs, in Fuelwatch and GroceryWatch and in all their other harebrained initiatives. It is money that could have been saved and which would save lives because we would not need these kinds of policy initiatives that the Labor Party is taking.

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