Mathias Cormann (WA, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

$391 million, Senator Nash. The Treasurer, Mr Swan, is putting his hands straight into the pockets of the people that have their private health insurance with Medibank Private. To put that in perspective, Mr Acting Deputy President, how much profit do you think Medibank Private made this year? They made $126 million worth of profit but they are expected to pay the government $391 million. In fact, since this government turned Medibank Private into a for-profit operation, Medibank Private has been required to pay this government, desperate for cash, more than $800 million in ordinary and special dividends. Once you add the company tax requirements on top of that, this government has collected more than $1 billion in additional revenue from Medibank Private, which of course is money that has been accumulated by people paying their private health insurance premiums year in and year out.

But it is not just Medibank Private. The Reserve Bank of Australia was required to pay $500 million straight out of their reserves, even though only a few years ago the Reserve Bank said that their capital reserves were too low. That was at a time when they were much higher than they are now, but $500 million has come out of the Reserve Bank. You keep adding it up: $391 million from Medibank Private, $500 million from the Reserve Bank, a couple of hundred million from the Australian Reinsurance Corporation. Then there is the $762 million out of people's bank accounts, out of people's super, out of people's first home saver accounts, out of people's life insurance. If you put it all together, people across Australia will readily understand that the promised $1.77 billion wafer-thin surplus in 2012-13 is nothing but an illusion, a figment of the Labor Party's imagination. I have not even touched on the conveniently timed sale of spectrum, which leads to a $3½ billion spike in revenue in 2012-13—conveniently at the time when this government wants to make people believe it will be able to deliver a surplus.

Because this government is always desperate for more cash in order to plug another budget black hole and to feed yet another addiction to wasteful and reckless spending, it has absolutely no shame in pursuing bills like this one with indecent haste. This legislation was first announced in the MYEFO just a few weeks ago. The government wants it to come into effect on 31 December and now wants to have collected all the cash by the end of May. The government did agree to defer aspects of this until the end of May, but that delay is inadequate to deal with some of the consequences of this rushed approach. There is always a cost when you rush these sorts of measures because you want to collect cash quickly. This rush comes at a cost ultimately to people across Australia who are going to be captured by this legislation. Because of the government's judgement and the way it has defined things in this legislation, there is a view that their bank accounts or super accounts are all of a sudden lost.

The coalition will move to amend this bill to delay implementation and if those amendments fail we will oppose the bill. Quite frankly, we think the government should withdraw this bill in order to facilitate a more orderly transition to what the government is trying to achieve. The government did move some amendments in the House of Representatives, which was an admission that they had got their legislation wrong upfront when they tried to rush things through in even more indecent haste than what is happening now in the Senate, but it is still too rushed. Implementing these changes by 31 December this year, which was the original deadline, was just completely impossible for industry and was a recipe for disaster, as the rushed inquiry into this bill also made explicit. By delaying these deadlines at least a bit, the government has finally admitted this. But the problem is that the delay in the implementation deadline to 31 May 2013 is effectively tokenistic and quite ineffective. Before, people were required to have all their payment transfers done by the end of April; that is now going to be by the end of May. So, effectively, it is just a one-month delay.

While delaying to 31 May all the other aspects avoids a disaster over the Christmas period, it still requires banks and super funds to do a second set of processes similar but prior to those required by other government regulation changes or super reforms in the back half of 2013. As such, the extra processing and double handling is still not avoided, just pushed into the front half of 2013, along with the extra costs, the extra risks of unintended consequences and so on. Ultimately, that will be borne by people across Australia who are going to get caught up in this—all to facilitate $762 million in additional cash for this cash strapped and cash desperate government. The rushing of this legislation will impose costs. These costs will be borne in the end by the account holders, the consumers.

The problem with all of this is that we actually agree that the stated objective of the legislation, what the government say they are trying to achieve, is quite sound. If the objective is to reunite people with their money more quickly, that is fine. There is nothing wrong with that. What we get cynical and concerned about is that when the government say, 'We want to get you your money back more quickly,' they end up with $762 million of it in the next six months. How can that be in the best interests of people across Australia?