Tony Abbott (Warringah, Liberal Party, Leader of the House) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Gilmore for her question and I point out to her that support for private health insurance has been one of the signature policies of the Howard government. Thanks to measures such as the private health insurance rebate, almost nine million Australians enjoy the added security and choice that private cover brings, including one million earning less than $20,000 a year. No-one likes price rises, but I point out that the annual average private health insurance price rise has been 5½ per cent since 1996. It was 11 per cent a year during the term of the former Labor government.

Without the rebate, which the Labor Party wants to abolish, the average Australian family would be paying nearly $1,000 a year more for their private health insurance. The Leader of the Opposition described the private health insurance rebate as a boondoggle in one of his less verbose moments. We had the member for Lalor cook up Medicare Gold as a secret deal to destroy the rebate. Labor’s old guard hate the rebate, and so do the union hacks who are now seeking to take their places. We have the AWU and Mr Bill Shorten, the future member for Maribyrnong and the self-styled next Labor Prime Minister, the self-styled Messiah of the Labor Party. He says the rebate is a ‘subsidy to the rich’. We have the NUW’s Martin Pakula. If the ACTU website is any guide, he thinks the rebate ‘drains resources from public hospitals and undermines bulk-billing’.

Mr Pakula may be very appealing to Cambodian-speaking people, who are just two per cent of the electorate of Hotham but 30 per cent of the Labor preselectors of Hotham. What about the 42 per cent of the electors of Hotham who have private health insurance? I read in the Australian last Friday that he still has the Greek branches but he has lost the Spanish branches, the Vietnamese branches as well as the Cambodian branches. I could not help but think, ‘Are there any Australians left in the so-called Australian Labor Party today?’

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