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

Before I continue I would just like to recount to the House what one of my colleagues has just said. This has been highly embarrassing for him; he has had a group of highly paid professional and business people in his office this afternoon who were unable to continue the business that they came to Canberra, at their own great personal expense, to conduct because of the antics of the other side. It is a disgrace that the Labor Party would treat with contempt members of the public who are here to do their business and want to see parliament doing its business instead of playing these puerile, infantile games. It is a disgrace and I hope the public is aware of this.

I return to what I was saying. The two differences between the Labor Party and the government in privatising commercial government business are not a realisation or an acknowledgment of the greater efficiency of private ownership but simply a result of two facts. The first is that at least the coalition is up-front. For a long time we have made very clear our policy of privatisation. In the 13 years before the spate of commercialisation, private asset sales, of the other side, not once did the Hawke-Keating government tell voters that that was what they had planned. In fact, they did quite the contrary. In the outrageous case of the sale of the Commonwealth Bank by the then Labor government, in their prospectus, in an official public document, in September 2003 the Labor government said, ‘We have no intention of reducing our ownership to less than 50.1 cent.’ This was an official government document that stated their position, and yet what happened? One year later that public commitment was denied and they sold the other half. Just one year later, we had the member for Brand publicly trying to justify what one year earlier they had denied they would do.

The second difference between the approach of the Labor Party and that of the coalition when it comes to privatisation is the way in which the proceeds are used. Just think of what happened with that massive spate of privatisations under the last few years of the Hawke-Keating government. Did that money go to pay off debt? Did that money go to building infrastructure? No, that money was flushed down the drain with a whole lot of other money in irresponsible, profligate recurrent expenditure. It was expenditure that, in addition to those massive asset sales, ran up another $70 billion worth of deficits in just five years. By contrast—and the contrast could not be clearer—with this government the proceeds of any asset sales have gone towards retiring the debt left by Labor and now go into the Future Fund to help accommodate the costs associated with an ageing population. In fact, of this sale of Medibank Private, $670 million has been committed for medical research. The hypocrisy of those on the other side could not be more glaring.

I would like to turn briefly now to a couple of the specifics of this sale. This sale of Medibank Private will add—contrary to the assertions from the other side—to competition in the private health insurance industry. It will—and this has been commercial advice to the government—increase their ability to diversify and add pressure to other private health insurance providers. There are 38 private companies already offering private health insurance and this will add to the competition between those. The CEO of NIB health insurance, Mr Mark Fitzgibbon—who should know: he is in this business—said this:

The pressure on premiums will be reduced if Medibank goes private. We expect much more aggressive competition from a privately owned Medibank.

This is someone in the industry, a CEO of a major health insurance provider, acknowledging that this competition will force premiums down.

While I am on premiums, it is interesting to make this point. We hear from the other side that we have had these terrible rises in private health insurance premiums under the Howard government.

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