Paul Neville (Hinkler, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

I am sure the member for Oxley will be quite relaxed when I tell him what I want to talk about. I want to talk about health insurance and the fact that the government is raising the threshold from an income of $50,000 per annum to one of $100,000 per annum. I am not against the lifting of the threshold. It has not been lifted for some years. I would have been reasonably relaxed about it if the threshold figure had been fixed at $65,000 or $75,000 per annum, having been taken in line with a growth figure per year in the health budget or with CPI. But to take it up to $100,000 is definitely going to cause a lot of people to drop out of private health insurance. It is probably going to affect the younger married sector who are pretty healthy and who say, ‘Oh well, we don’t really need this and we’ll drop out.’ The government estimates that 500,000 families will drop out of private health insurance as a result of lifting that threshold—in other words, they will no longer have to pay the levy. Various other sources—economists, commentators, the AMA and so on—estimate the figure as somewhere between 800,000 and one million. That is nearly twice the figure estimated by the government.

Here is the point I want to make—I am sure the member for Oxley will understand it now: amongst that one million people are people who are taking the extras on their private health insurance, including dentistry. I do not know the percentage figure—I would like to know it; I think I would find it very enlightening—but that means that when they drop out they also drop out of having the capacity to pay for dental care. As a result of this, a proportion of those people will shift to the state system. Not all of them will. Some will still say, ‘We can put a bit aside for dental care because we do not have to pay the health insurance premium,’ but most of them will probably say: ‘We will now go on to the state system. We are not going to have private health insurance. We will go on to Medicare for our normal health services and on to the state system for other dental care.’ That is going to add to the number of those seeking dental care.

I also question whether the government has really thought through—and this also impacts indirectly on this dental matter—the idea of the superclinics. I have not found a community yet—although this may not be the case in the outer metropolitan suburbs with which I am not familiar—where anyone wants one of these superclinics. There are perfectly well-run, bulk-billing clinics in Bundaberg that are seven-, eight- and nine-doctor practices but which have only four or five doctors. What possible good would it be to build a superclinic in Bundaberg where we cannot get doctors in the private sector? We cannot get enough doctors in the public hospital. How in heaven’s name are we going to be able to get the doctors into these superclinics? I am told that the government may consider tendering these things out. That would introduce a third level of compliance. You would probably have private doctors, public doctors and these superclinic doctors. The government is equivocating even about that program. It was going to be $5 million, but now it is up to $5 million. Now it may not be a new superclinic; it might be the renovation of a building—in other words, they might do up the old outpatients’ building somewhere that has been closed for a few years. But why would you invest the quantum that would be required to do that at the expense of what could be going into dental care?

I recognise, all Australians recognise, that dental care has not been as good as it might be. We all recognise that. But we need to have a wider strategy that involves, for one thing, the fluoridation of water in those states that do not have it. I would like to see an examination of the ability of dental health clinics to be used in secondary schools. I would like to encourage people to stay in private health insurance and even encourage people to take up dental benefits within that private health insurance. I think that in that way we can share the burden fairly and give the state clinics a better chance of catching up and doing the job that they were destined to do. They are interesting bills, symbolically good; but in practice, in delivering things on the ground, no, they fall very short.

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