Julia Gillard (Lalor, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Health and Manager of Opposition Business in the House) Share this | Hansard source

It is his dereliction of duty that I am coming to right now. Then, of course, the Minister for Finance and Administration issued a clarification on the weekend. He had to say to the Australian community: ‘When I was wandering around saying that selling Medibank Private’s going to put downward pressure on premiums, I didn’t want anyone to actually believe premiums were going to go down. If you thought that, I’m sorry, because it’s not what I meant; they are going to go up.’

This is the state of the government’s case about what the sale of Medibank Private would mean for premiums. Everybody knows that the case they were putting was laughable and that the pressure from the Medibank Private sale on premiums would be to put premiums up for Australian families.

Finally, the political case for selling Medibank Private fell apart. There we have it: the legal case fell apart, the case about premiums fell apart and then finally the political case for selling Medibank Private fell apart when the government got the news through today’s newspapers that Australians did not want Medibank Private sold. In case there were any doubts in anybody’s mind, there it was on the front page of today’s newspaper: 63 per cent of Australians did not want Medibank Private sold. So incompetent has this government’s argument for the sale of Medibank Private been that nearly half of coalition voters did not want it sold. Even half of the people who, day after day, think the government is doing a good job did not want it sold. Even more disproportionately, other Australians did not want it sold. So the case for selling Medibank Private fell apart.

But what do the government do? They do not do the right thing. The right thing would have been to walk out today to a press conference with the cameras and say: ‘On 26 April, we got it wrong. Selling Medibank Private’s wrong. We will keep Medibank Private in government ownership.’ That is what they should have done. But of course that is not what they have done. What they have done is to put off the sale until after the next election in the hope that they can hide it behind that election, in the hope that people will vote at the next election having forgotten about this issue. The day after the election, there they will be, actioning the sale of Medibank Private. So no-one should be confused about this: the return of the Howard government means the sale of Medibank Private.

But the return of the Howard government could mean the sale of so much more. We had the minister for health on radio this morning. I thought he was coming out with some sort of red herring—but, if this is a red herring, it is a big one. He was out there today saying, ‘Why don’t we contemplate private management for public hospitals?’ But then he went beyond that and spoke about basically having public hospitals for profit and in the hands of the private sector. If you have a public hospital that is for profit and in the hands of the private sector, most people would call that a private hospital. Let me give you a flash. Let me give you a tip. Most people would call that a private hospital and most people would say that is about selling public hospitals to the private sector.

Let me quote the minister. Mr Abbott would not say if the plan was the first step to complete hospital privatisation or confirm whether the government expected hospitals under the plan to be run at a profit. But he said: ‘Obviously, if you are a private business, you want to make a profit. But how a private sector manager runs a public hospital would be very much up to the relevant state government to determine.’ So, next election, if this government is returned, sell Medibank Private and put a for sale sign outside every public hospital in this country. That is what this minister wants to do, and do not make any mistake about it.

It will not stop there. We know that this is a government that, despite its rhetoric, has always wanted to do something to Medicare—to get rid of it, to abolish it, to confine it—and that is the other part of this agenda: sell Medibank Private and put a for sale sign on every public hospital. Then the next step, verified by none other than Wilson Tuckey, the federal member for O’Connor, would be the privatisation of Medicare. He said:

While selling Medibank Private will achieve a reduction in private health insurance costs, the real need is to include the services of the Health Insurance Commission or Medicare as we know it in the privatisation package.

This is a government that laughs uproariously at the stupid joke that it is the best friend Medicare ever had. Well, with friends like this, who needs enemies? A for sale sign on Medibank Private, a for sale sign on public hospitals and a for sale sign on Medicare—they are the health plans of this government if it wins the next election. (Time expired)

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