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

I thank the member for Forde for her question. I appreciate her strong support for the health professionals in her area, many of whom require the private health insurance system to sustain them. Let me make it clear to the House, including the member for Forde, that support for private health insurance remains one of the signature policies of the Howard government. Thanks to these policies, particularly the private health insurance rebate, private health cover has grown from just 30 per cent to some 43 per cent of the population. That means than nine million Australians, including 40,000 people in the electorate of Forde, now enjoy the security and choice given to them by private cover. Next year the government will make a good product even better by allowing the funds to extend their basic tables to cover treatments that will reduce or avoid the need for hospitalisation.

Despite the obvious success of our private health insurance system, members opposite still want to rip the guts out of it. They hate private health insurance. They particularly hate the private health insurance rebate, which the Leader of the Opposition once described as an extraordinarily bad piece of public policy which, in his words, ‘reinforced failure’. Then we have the member for Perth, who described the rebate as ‘a public policy crime’. At the last election, members opposite said they would keep the rebate. But we know that they had a secret plan to destroy it. The former Leader of the Opposition, in his celebrated diaries, said that Medicare Gold was ‘my plan for killing the private health insurance rebate’.

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