Steven Ciobo (Moncrieff, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Small Business, the Service Economy and Tourism) Share this | Hansard source

I notice the Parliamentary Secretary for Regional Development and Northern Australia saying that it is about exercising choice. Let us put this in another perspective. Is it fair for those who cannot afford to exercise choice to have to wait in a public hospital room for emergency treatment for seven or eight hours because they do not have a choice? Is it fair for someone who earns $30,000 a year and might have two kids to have to line up in a public hospital room and wait for seven or eight hours to get access to public services? Is that a fair choice? Or is it fairer that those who earn significantly higher incomes than the Australian average should be given incentive to take out private medical cover? That to me is a much more sane and logical public health policy than the bill that is before the House today.

What the Labor Party say is that they want to take away any incentive that exists, basically, for private medical cover. So I ask the parliamentary secretary: is it fair that someone who cannot afford private medical cover should have to give birth on the floor of a storeroom in a public hospital? Is that fair? Is it fair that a woman who is having a miscarriage should have to do that in a public toilet at the Royal North Shore Hospital because they are so understaffed that they do not have a situation in which they can tend to that woman’s miscarriage? Is that fair on that woman? Is it fair that they should have to suffer that kind of trauma?

The reality is that we have seen wholesale failure by the Labor Party when it comes to public health. Again, there is no clearer example of the kind of failure that we see by the Labor Party than what exists in the Queensland health system. The Labor Party has been in power in Queensland for over a decade. And what have we seen over that period? We have seen the Queensland public health system basically collapse. It is a disgrace that in a modern-day country like Australia we should be laboured with the kind of public health system that we see in Queensland or indeed in New South Wales. That is a reflection of a decade of state Labor government ideology, the same ideology that permeates the front bench of this government and that, I believe, is in the longer term basically going to destroy any public confidence that still exists in the public health system.

So I suggest to members opposite that they do not lecture us about choice. They might like to go out to their electorates in Western Sydney, western Melbourne, the south side of Brisbane and to places like Nerang on the Gold Coast and explain to those who cannot afford the luxury of choice why they should have to line up in a public hospital for five, six or seven hours alongside someone who could not only afford to be in the private system but should be given the incentive to be in the private system. I would also like the Labor Party, while they are at it, to explain why it is that, when the Labor Party solution is a GP superclinic, a city of 600,000 people is not getting one. To make it worse and to rub salt into the wound, not only are they denying 600,000 people a GP superclinic but they are cutting after-hours medical funding. That is what the Labor Party’s plan is for public health.

I cannot believe—and I find it galling—that the Minister for Health and Ageing came into this chamber at the start of this debate and questioned my commitment to public health on the Gold Coast. So I say to those Labor members opposite that they need to have a good long hard look at themselves. Do not stand up and say to the Australian people that this bill that drives a million people from the private system back into the public health system at a time when our public health system cannot cope with the demand that is already on it is in some way going to be beneficial. I am yet to hear a single speaker from the Labor Party stand up and explain how the public health system is going to cope with a million extra people.

When I hear a Labor member stand at the dispatch box or in their place and say that there is so much capacity in the public health system that they can accommodate a million extra people, then I will start to take them seriously. But none of them say it because they know the truth—that a woman having a miscarriage in a toilet in a public hospital foyer, a woman giving birth on the floor of a storeroom in the Gold Coast Hospital and emergency rooms being put on bypass basically as often as they are accepting patients are signs that our public health system is in crisis. Under the former government, when the coalition were in power, we were looking about doing something to improve that situation—

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