Nicola Roxon (Gellibrand, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Health) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Health Legislation Amendment Bill 2007. The bill proposes to rectify some unintended consequences of two sets of major health sector reforms implemented by the government earlier this year—that is, the private health insurance reforms, which commenced on 1 April 2007, and the pharmaceutical benefits scheme reforms, the first tranche of which came into effect on 1 August 2007.

Labor supported the original legislation in these two areas, with some amendments, and will support this bill. Can I say at the outset that I am disappointed that we have to revisit and correct aspects of these reforms so quickly. Perhaps the government should be spending a little less time worrying just about their re-election and a tad more time governing the country while they are still in control of the reins. It is disappointing to us to have to be here when very detailed, complex legislative packages have already been through the parliament and through a Senate process.

It may be that the government might actually understand that some of our arguments for having proper consultation periods with initial sets of legislation and allowing for Senate processes might have detected these problems earlier. I am sure that it is very frustrating for the department to have to encourage the Minister for Health and Ageing to come back here and rush through another set of changes after we have been through such a complex process already. So I put on the record that, although we are happy enough to support these changes, we think it is a real indication that the government are not concentrating on the business of governing any longer, that they have become so focused on an election that has not even been called that they do not seem able to take care to get the detail right in their legislation. These two legislative packages were important, they were complex changes and we dealt with both of them in a fairly rushed environment, if I recollect correctly. The fact that we are revisiting them again so soon after their respective commencements points to poor management of detail by the minister when implementing major changes to the health sector.

I have to emphasise as well that, despite the fact that these amendments relate to a package of changes that have been in place since 1 August and 1 April, the first we learnt of this legislation was Wednesday. The bill was introduced by the minister on Thursday and here we are debating it today in the House. I understand that it is listed for debate in the Senate tomorrow. To top all of this off, to add to our litany of complaints about the day-to-day management of legislation going through this House, we were informed last night that there are further amendments to the bill that we will be debating today as well.

I think this smacks, as I say, of a minister and a government who really have stopped paying attention to the detail of governing. They seem to think that legislation is something that should just happily go through this place. Somehow or other the departments and bureaucrats will make it all happen and will be left to tidy up any mess, and the minister should have no accountability for not being able to introduce major legislative reform without us having to be back here within months of that legislation passing the first time. But we have become used to expecting that as the way that the minister operates.

Given that the minister’s favourite phrase at the moment is something similar to that, it may be worth his staff and the departmental officials who are here reminding the minister that you cannot be a serious health minister if you do not have a health policy and you cannot be a manager of government business if you cannot actually manage government business. This bill today is a perfect example of a minister who has stopped being a health minister, who has not got across the detail, who cannot manage government business and who is wasting the time of the House by requiring us to be back here again because he did not take the time to get the detail right to start with.

I am worried, because legislation is something that should be core work for government. It is detailed work and I do not pretend that this package is not difficult. Probably anybody in the sector would have thought that over a period of years there would be times that we would be revisiting the changes as things were tweaked and problems were picked up in the implementation, but to be doing this so soon after their introduction I think is a sign that the minister did not take the care and attention that was needed in first introducing these bills and did not allow for the processes to run for sufficient time—for example, in the Senate committee. Perhaps industry would have raised these issues earlier.

We know that the minister has officially said that he will not deal with these sorts of issues. He has said that he is not going to concentrate on anything that does not involve the election. He is on the public record as saying that and, as I say, it does leave the poor staff in the department, who are no doubt working hard to make this legislation effective, to pick up the pieces around him.

Let us turn to the detail of the bill before us. Schedule 1 proposes amendments to the private health insurance reforms which commenced on 1 April 2007—my birthday, in fact. What a day for those changes to come into effect!

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