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

I hear the minister for health interjecting about whether I am interested in health on the Gold Coast. Let me put on the record some very specific and pertinent facts about the Gold Coast for the minister for health. We are a city of 600,000 people that have a public health system groaning under the weight of that population. We have been the fastest-growing city for the last 25 years and we are anticipated to be the fastest-growing city for the next 30 years. I am happy to explain to the minister for health the situation on the ground on the Gold Coast. Only one week ago there was a lady who was forced to give birth on the floor in a storeroom in the Gold Coast Hospital. The minister for health will look at the Australian people and say that the proposal before the House today to drive one million extra people from private health into public health is going to fix that system.

I have a few more home truths for the minister for health. In this city of 600,000 the former coalition government had a very strong emphasis on making sure that there were opportunities for people to access health services, both privately and through the public system. One of the key measures that we introduced to make sure that people in the community had access to medical health was direct government assistance for after-hours medical care. We recognised that people do not always get sick between 9 am and 5 pm. People look to access health care outside of normal business hours. That is why the coalition had, as a very strong and key part of its focus, the desire to fund private GP clinics with additional funding so that members of the Gold Coast community could access those health centres.

The after-hours clinics, and in particular I would name but one GP clinic called Medcall, actually used those Commonwealth funds to provide after-hours care where the doctor would actually visit the patient. How is that for a health revolution? The doctor would visit the patient. I thought that this system was working well. It built on the coalition’s commitment in my own electorate, as well as my neighbouring electorates of Fadden and McPherson, to build two new medical schools on the Gold Coast. We were starting to make progress. Two new medical schools were being built to help solve the doctor shortage in a very meaningful and long-term way and additional funding was available to make sure that there was after-hours care available to Gold Coast residents.

Then the Labor Party came along and said, ‘We want to end the blame game.’ It was as though the Prime Minister had a piece of string coming out of his chest and when you pulled it he would say, ‘I believe in ending the blame game,’ and then you would pull it again: ‘I believe in ending the blame game.’ That was the sum total of Labor’s contribution, at the lead-up to the last federal election, on what they were proposing with health. They never unmasked their true plans, which the Minister for Health and Ageing has now done and which are encapsulated in the bill before the House today.

We know that only two weeks ago when a woman in my city was giving birth on the floor of a storeroom in the public hospital—where the public hospital is on bypass virtually more often than it is actually accepting patients through the emergency ward—we had the Labor Party stand up and say, ‘We believe the way to help solve this problem is through GP superclinics.’ How interesting that, with the rollout of 31 GP superclinics across Australia, not a single one was delivered for the Gold Coast—a city of 600,000 people did not receive a single GP superclinic. The GP superclinics, I remind the House, were Labor’s solution for people being able to access health care.

To compound the problem, not only did the Labor Party not fund a GP superclinic on the Gold Coast but they cut funding of after-hours medical care, and now public patients on the Gold Coast who are, for example, injured in the workplace or a car accident or require medical care no longer have the option of seeking after-hours medical care. They no longer have any chance of realising a GP superclinic, as the Labor Party promised. To make matters worse, they now have to fall back on the public health system, which, thanks to the bill that is before the House today, will have an extra million people from the private system pushed onto it. That is Labor’s brilliant plan.

The Minister for Health and Ageing dares to challenge me about whether or not I will support public patients on the Gold Coast. The minister dares to question my commitment to Gold Coasters by asking why I do not want to see them being forced to use the Gold Coast public hospital. It is because the social engineers that sit on the government front bench, who are completely and profoundly blind and driven by ideology, are so focused on their so-called public health utopia that they fail to recognise that they are destroying public health in this country with their ideological obsession. It just so happens that perhaps the clearest case in point is the city of 600,000 people that I represent.

I say to the minister for health: ‘Don’t you come in here and lecture me about public health.’ I say to the Rudd Labor government: ‘Don’t you dare lecture the 600,000 people on the Gold Coast about how your plans for health are going to be an improvement,’ when the only thing that they will be realising is that they will lose after-hours GP clinics, they will not get a GP superclinic and they will be forced to use the public hospital, which cannot cope with current demand let alone the million extra people who are going to be driven from the private system to the public system, thanks to the bill currently before this chamber.

I think it is time that the Labor Party seriously considered what it is doing. In its pursuit of ideology, it is clear that the inroads and the important steps that the coalition made over the last 11 years are being completely eroded. The coalition stand for one very clear principle: it is the right of all Australians to have choice when it comes to their healthcare needs. It is the right of all Australians to choose between whether they would like to use the public system or whether they would like to seek private medical insurance.

In many respects, it is interesting to have a look at the passage of time and the way in which social trends have been influenced by government policy. In the early 1970s about 90 per cent of the Australian population were covered in some form by private medical insurance. Then we had the great Labor icon Gough Whitlam. He decreed that public health should be universal so that millionaires could use the public health system and be subsidised by taxpayers. After that great Labor icon Gough Whitlam went about tinkering with Australia’s health system, we saw private health insurance rates plummet to basically an all-time low of about 33 per cent at the end of the Hawke-Keating era. So we went from about 90 per cent of people having private health coverage to about 33 per cent.

What was the consequence of that? We had so many Australians reliant on the public health system but it did not matter to the Labor Party whether they could pay their own way or not. It did not matter that you could have a millionaire lining up beside an Aussie battler on $30,000 a year, both seeking to use the same public health service. As a result, our public system started to collapse under the sheer weight of numbers. That is the reason why the former coalition government took the very considered and deliberate action of providing an incentive for Australians to utilise private health.

A key part of doing that was not just the 30 per cent rebate on private medical insurance and the introduction of community rating in private health insurance but also the fact that we introduced the Medicare levy surcharge. When the coalition introduced this policy, we took the view that if you earned over $50,000 you were in a situation where you could afford to make a contribution to your private health. And, in making that contribution, we wanted to make sure that people still had the choice of utilising it or not. If they chose not to take out private medical cover, they could remain in the public system but they would be charged an additional Medicare levy. We on this side of the House know—as much as the Labor Party is driven by and blinded by ideology to have one universal public health system, and that is it—that without that additional surcharge the public system will groan and strain under the sheer weight of numbers. That is why that policy was introduced.

With the bill that is before the House today, the Labor Party has now changed and moved the goalposts, so much so that on Treasury’s own forecasts, according to the budget, we are going to see 485,000 taxpayers—and I emphasise the word ‘taxpayers’—shift from private health back into the public system. I notice the parliamentary secretary at the table nodding in furious agreement. We now see that 485,000 taxpayers will move from the private system to the public system, and the Labor Party is happy about that. So now we will see—according to the private medical insurers, who have done their research—that those 485,000 taxpayers actually equate, when you start to take into account family units and so on, to nearly a million Australians making the transition from the private medical system to the public health system.

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