Sue Boyce (Queensland, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I would like to take note of answers given by Senator Ludwig during question time, particularly in relation to some further comments he made about the question that I asked him. Senator Ludwig claimed that it was not legitimate to use comments that he had made during a debate around the privatisation of Medibank Private in the current situation, which—using Labor-speak—is not the privatisation of Medibank Private but the turning of Medibank Private into a hollow log for the government. It will still be a for-profit company. It will be owned by the government. It may not be owned by the public as it would be if it were a private company. It will just be paying out to the government.

I mention again the comments made at the time by Senator Ludwig, who said during a discussion about whether Medibank Private should be a private company—that is, a for-profit company—that it stands to reason that if you have to generate a profit that places an additional burden on premiums. That was said by Senator Ludwig in 2006. He wants to obfuscate now and claim that that related only to privatising Medibank Private, not to creating a Medibank Private government owned business enterprise which—guess what?—will pay taxes and distribute dividends. I thought that this would have suggested that the two were not entirely dissimilar. And we are told that Medibank Private is to become a government owned business enterprise in the name of competitive neutrality—that is, that this enterprise will do exactly what private, for-profit insurers in this market are required to do. It will pay taxes and it will distribute dividends. So I am still a little puzzled what the difference in market forces on the premiums of Medibank Private in its new guise might be that would make it any different from any other company in this space or different from a privatised Medibank Private.

Let us look at why the government would not want to turn Medibank Private into a private company. It is about who gets the dividends.

…This is an exercise that has been turned into a fine and high art by the state Labor governments of Australia: ripping the profits out of government owned enterprises to prop up their own inadequate, deficit-ridden economies. Time after time, successful organisations have been ruined, leaving states with energy crises because so much money was ripped out of the electricity providers. States have had water crises because no funds were left in the government owned enterprises to build the infrastructure necessary to maintain population growth.

Now we have another hollow log that the Labor government has created in the name of competitive neutrality so it can rip some of the profits out of Medibank Private, out of the hands of private patients and private medical practitioners in Australia, and stick them in its own little pocket in an attempt to mitigate the worst excesses of the deficit that it has allowed to develop. There is only one reason this has become a government owned enterprise and not a not-for-profit company. We also had Senator Ludwig telling us that only 25,000 people will drop out. This is yet another example of the politics of envy that the government practises. Only 12,000 people lost the baby bonus—the numbers go on and on. The government is cherry picking people who deserve better treatment. (Time expired)

Question agreed to.