Kerry Bartlett (Macquarie, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Before the Labor Party sought to stop me exercising my democratic right in here, I was wondering about the reason for the sudden conversion of those opposite. The party that for 13 years were opposed to private health insurance now are suddenly supposedly its greatest champion. They did nothing to stop that steady decline in numbers that would have pushed private health insurance membership to below the critical mass of where it was sustainable. Now, supposedly, they are its greatest champion.

This is the party that in November 1998 voted against the government’s legislation to allow a 30 per cent rebate on private health insurance. This is the party that voted against the government’s measures to make private health insurance more affordable and more widely available in this community. Now suddenly it is its greatest champion! Suddenly it wants to be the defender and the protector of private health insurance! This is the party that had no time for private health insurance when in government and now supposedly wants to protect it. Let us just look, for instance, at what was said by the former Leader of the Opposition in the recently published The Latham Diaries. The former member for Werriwa said:

We have worked out a way of dealing with the despised private health insurance rebate.

The ‘despised private health insurance rebate’.

We need to kill it slowly ... dismantling it slice by slice.

This is from the former leader of the party that now supposedly is the protector and defender of private health insurance. Again I quote from the former Leader of the Opposition referring to the current Leader of the Opposition:

At different times Beazley has boasted to Caucus that it—

the private health insurance rebate—

will go.

This is the party that now wants to be seen as the defender of private health insurance. It is either a dramatic and wonderful conversion or rank hypocrisy.

Let us look at Labor’s broader record on privatisation. Again, it is not what they say but what they do. What was Labor’s record on privatisation when they were in office? They sold the Commonwealth Bank, sold Qantas, sold Commonwealth Serum Laboratories, sold Snowy Mountains Engineering Corporation, sold Aerospace Technologies and sold the Moomba-Sydney Pipeline. On and on the list goes. They even had clear plans to sell Telstra.

There is no difference between the opposition and the government in the acknowledgement of the benefits of private ownership of government commercial enterprises. We had the member for Brand in 1995, when trying to justify the spate of asset sales of the former government, out there promoting the reasons for private ownership of these commercial enterprises, saying how it would increase their efficiency and how there was no need for the government to own those enterprises. Now suddenly they are opposed to these privatisations.

The approach of the former government and the approach of this government in terms of acknowledging the efficiency of private ownership in these corporations are very similar. But there are two marked differences in the approaches to asset sales or privatisations of the Labor Party and of the coalition. The first difference is that the coalition is clearly up-front in saying what it intends to do. We have said in the past that we would be selling Medibank Private and we have said in the past that we would be privatising Telstra. On the other side, not once in their 13 years did the Hawke or Keating governments commit before an election to what they had intended to do.

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