Ms Catherine King (Ballarat, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Health) Share this | Hansard source

What an unedifying display it was in question time today to see the Prime Minister of this country who has introduced the most regressive policies when it comes to health actually not understand or know the detail of his policies, of the imposition of the GP tax when it comes to diagnostic imaging. In fact, the statements that the Prime Minister said in relation to diagnostic imaging are simply untrue. It is absolutely extraordinary when it comes to one of the government's own budget measures, when it comes to health policy, that the Prime Minister through those budget measures will be making it harder for people who need to get a cancer diagnosis, adding hundreds and thousands of dollars of up-front costs for people having to access diagnostic imaging for their cancer diagnosis—hundreds of dollars out of pocket.

We were not making figures up or plucking them from the air; these were figures that have come from the Australian Diagnostic Imaging Association. The impact of the government's budget when it comes to diagnostic imaging is more than $7. The government has not been telling the truth to the Australian public about its $7 GP tax when it comes to diagnostic imaging. That is because it is not just a $7 GP tax that represents a $5 rebate reduction per item, not per time, that you have to represent for diagnostic imaging. It may be a number of MBS items are actually charged during that time. So it is a $5 rebate reduction per item according to the advice of the Department of Health to the Australian Diagnostic Imaging Association. It is also the abolition of the 10 per cent cut in rebates for general patients who were previously bulk-billed due to the abolition of the bulk-billing incentive.

The Prime Minister sought in question time to say, 'Oh, there's a low gap incentive that will cover that.' That is simply not true. The low gap incentive does not apply to anybody who is a general patient. So if you are general patient, not a concession card holder, and you currently go to diagnostic imaging and you do not have a lot of money, and the radiographer decides that you should be bulk-billed for that cancer diagnosis, something that is very expensive to undertake, then what happens is that you will have to pay up-front for a start and you will have to pay the additional cost that now will be borne by the radiographer because the government has got rid of the 10 per cent bulk-billing incentive.

The other thing that they have done is that they have abolished the general permissible gap which moderates the cost of high cost items from 1 January 2016. The figures are, frankly, pretty disturbing. For those high-end scans when you are talking about PET scans in particular, that can potentially be $1,000. That is $1,000 that you will have to pay up-front in order to get your PET scan. This is how absolutely appalling these measures are that this government has introduced. It is not telling the Australian public the truth about the impact of its decision to apply—I call it a GP tax because it is about raising revenue off the back of sick people; that is exactly what it is—what its co-payment, as it calls it, actually means for diagnostic imaging. It is a very serious issue. We already know that people often leave their scans, their access to be able to get their cancers diagnosed, too late in some circumstances. We know that many people—we want to be optimistic about our health—put off finding out what is wrong with them and that often means that they leave their scans too late for a cancer diagnosis. We do not want that to happen in this country. We do not want barriers to be put in place for people accessing the diagnostic imaging that they need in order to have a diagnosis of cancer; we want people to do that early because they know they have a higher chance of survival. So what this government is doing with its measure, frankly, is making it less likely that people will be able to access diagnostic imaging, make it even more expensive up-front for people to get that diagnosis and will leave them potentially hundreds of dollars out of pocket.

I comes, of course, in the overall attack that this government has had on our universal health insurance scheme. We celebrated yesterday the life of Gough Whitlam and we on this side of the House that 40 years ago, when Medibank was introduced in a historic joint sitting of parliament to get it through, that this mob on the other side fought it tooth and nail—not only fought it tooth and nail but at the first opportunity they had they got rid of it. It took to get in the Hawke and Keating governments to introduce our universal health insurance scheme that is Medicare, the scheme that has served this country well, with some of the best health outcomes in the developed world. It is a scheme that we all support.

What we saw at the time was the Liberal-National Party saying that they would work with every breath in their body to try and kill off Medicare. We know that has been their agenda. What we have seen with this first Abbott government budget is an appalling attack on our universal health care system; a $7 GP tax for every time you go to see a GP, putting a barrier in the way of that critical primary-care part of our system where we want people to go to stay well, to access prevention—making it harder for people to access in fact what is the most efficient and cheapest part of our health care system that is at the centre of Medicare.

But it is not only a tax when you go to the GP; it is an X-ray tax, a pathology tax, an MRI tax, a tax on PET scans, a tax on CAT scans—a tax every time you need to access a diagnosis for cancer. Or if your kid falls off the monkey bars, in a circumstance I am very familiar with, and breaks their arm. It is a tax on all of those services. It is also more than $50 billion worth of cuts to the public hospital system, which has serious implications for health and hospital reform over the next decade. There were historic agreements that were reached with states and territories to reform our public hospital system and make it better: make it more efficient to get access to emergency departments and to elective surgery—to actually get the states and territories to agree on an efficient price for funding activity in hospitals, driving really important health reform.

The new Abbott government has decided that it does not want to be in the business of public hospitals. It actually thinks that the states should do it. It wants to withdraw and go back behind the barriers to say, 'We don't want to participate in actually reforming our public hospital system.' I know many people in the community want the Commonwealth to be in the business of reforming our hospital system and should be in the business of making sure people have access to decent emergency department waiting times and elective surgery waiting times.

We have also seen the $1.3 billion cut to pharmaceuticals, a bill that is sitting before the Senate at the moment. It is $1.3 billion, changing in a very sneaky measure the safety net, making it harder and harder for concession card patients to actually meet that safety net, and making the cost of medicines unaffordable in this country. There is also the $368 billion for the national partnership agreements on prevention, funding states that were relying on this from this financial year to tackle obesity, smoking rates and alcohol abuse—activities happening in communities right the way across the country: in our workplaces, in our schools and throughout our community organisations.

But there has also been more than $600 million cut from our public dental programs, including $200 million this financial year alone—walking away from the national partnership agreements for adult public dental services. There has been a cut of $197 million from what we call the health flexible funds, which have been going largely to not-for-profit organisations—things like the Heart Foundation, the Cancer Council and AIDS councils—to run their activities. This is really important work to improve our health system in communities across this country.

This is what the Abbott government's first budget means for health, and it is an unprecedented attack on our universal health insurance scheme. We know that if it was not for Gough Whitlam introducing Medibank 40 years ago we would not have Medicare today. We know that if the Liberal-National parties had their way, then Medicare would never have existed and they want to kill it off today. From the measures they have introduced into this budget, it is obvious that they are attempting to destroy Medicare by stealth and we absolutely on this side of the House stand and condemn them. Medicare is not your plaything. Keep your hands off Medicare; keep our public health insurance scheme! Learn the lessons of your own history. The Australian public will not stand for it!

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