Sharon Bird (Cunningham, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

That has long gone by the board. We are the party and the champions of real choice now, I say to the shadow minister at the table. The reality is that people, especially in the current economic times, are in a position where it is very difficult for them to sustain their private health insurance. At any point in time when private health insurance premiums go up I can guarantee that my phone will run hot. People are really annoyed that they are forced to take out private health insurance. They do not feel that they are getting a quality product; they do not feel that they are getting value for money. They cannot vote with their feet by pulling out of it, because the government has set it up so that they are stuck with the requirement to have private health insurance.

The private health insurance industry in this country is a pretty good one. It is pretty competitive. There is room for improvement. One of the best ways to keep them on their toes and provide a good service is not to have a captured market but to require them to go out and seek a market and ensure that people see that it is valuable, and they keep their private health insurance because it is valuable to them, not because the government is waving a stick over their head to force them to do so.

By 2005-06 nearly 500,000 people were trapped in the tax trap set up in the original legislation. We want to abolish that trap. We want to give some tax relief to those families earning around $50,000—hardly a high income in today’s economy. We have listened to the concerns, the views and indeed the proposals not only of the industry more broadly and various lobby groups around this area but also of opposition members in the Senate and their contributions and suggestions.

We should acknowledge that Senator Fielding has today indicated that he will support the legislation. It is important to provide immediate relief to approximately 330,000 Australians, a significant number, at a time when they most need it. We heard, from the member for Solomon earlier, that the new Leader of the Opposition has said that he is there to go into battle for working families. Here is one very simple and straightforward way to do that. We need to give people genuine choice and that is what we are attempting to do with this legislation.

I want to very briefly in my closing comments make the point that many members of the opposition have said that people will pull out of private health insurance, so the opposition, I assume, presume that the product is so appalling and so uncompetitive that people will not choose to stay simply because they are getting good service and value for their money. Instead you have to force them to stay in regardless of how bad the product or service might be. Their argument has by and large been that this will put massive pressure on the hospital system. Thank heavens there is now a federal government that for a start is not cutting money from the public hospital system, as has happened over the last 12 years, but is actually putting money back into providing training positions in universities for the staff needed for those systems.

At the end of the day, people should not be forced by the government into taking out private health insurance when they are on incomes that cannot sustain it. This legislation quite simply and purely corrects an anomaly. It is something that I would have certainly expected the Liberal Party to have argued for and I am surprised we are even having to debate the principles behind this legislation.

I commend the bill to the House. I commend Senator Fielding for acknowledging that the current economic situation means that the budget’s integrity has to take precedence and that he is therefore going to pass the government’s budget measures in the Senate. I think that is a responsible position to take. While I do not agree with many of his concerns about this bill, I do acknowledge his position and I commend the bill to the House.

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