Ian Macfarlane (Groom, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Trade) Share this | Hansard source

That is what you said, and I hope the Hansard picked up your interjection. What it shows is that there is a fundamental belief that the only people who should have health insurance are the rich people who support the Liberal Party. And the rest of them? The Labor Party is going to look after them in a public health system. I have a Labor government in Queensland and I know what it is like for those people in my electorate who try to use the public health system. They come in and complain continually about it. Health insurance is not the purview of the rich; it is the purview of people who want to take responsibility for their own health costs. And when we were in office our government made sure that it was affordable for a broader range of people than was the case before. We introduced the mechanisms to both encourage them and reward them. The Medicare levy surcharge was part of that encouragement. The reward was a 30 per cent rebate on their health insurance bill. Those two measures saw private health insurance under our government increase significantly.

What we are seeing with this bill is a very deliberate attempt by the Labor Party and the Rudd government to destroy private health insurance for the average person, to push the cost of health insurance up so far that more and more people will withdraw from it. So, while Treasury figures initially said 400,000 will get a tax cut from this, the knock-on effect from that will be a very significant drop-off in the number of people who are privately insured—perhaps a million people, based on figures that have been put around the place in the last few weeks. If it is only a million people then some of us will be relieved. But, if a million people leave these health funds, that effect will continue to cascade. Who knows what the ultimate figure will be! But one thing for sure is that young people and healthy people will not be insuring themselves. On that basis the impact on private health insurance premiums will be left to those who are either aged, sick or in urgent need of health insurance. The healthcare costs to the public health system will escalate beyond control. This sort of short-sighted populism is a hallmark of the Rudd Labor government. It is the hallmark of a government that has no regard for the long-term future of Australia.

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