Barry Haase (Kalgoorlie, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Roads and Transport) Share this | Hansard source

I was going to wade right into the issues that we are actually debating with this legislation—the Fairer Private Health Insurance Incentives Bill 2009 and cognate bills—but given that I have just had to sit through the presentation from the member for Shortland I feel I must address some of the comments she made in the first instance. She set about suggesting that one of the things the past government had done on coming to office was to destroy the dental health system. That is very interesting, because I have a particular interest in dental health and the system that was funded by the Commonwealth government and I fully understand why and when it was introduced. It was funded as a four-year program by the previous Labor government.

As I say, it was proposed for four years, because it was considered that dental health nationally was in a pretty deplorable condition. It had been allowed to deteriorate under collective ALP governments. The federal budget found funds to support that national dental health system for a period of four years, and when the forward estimates were examined when the Howard government came into office there was no funding to carry that program forward. So, rather than it being cancelled by the Howard government, it was simply allowed to lapse, as was planned by the previous government.

Listeners may be aware that when the Howard government moved into office in 1996 we found something like a $9 billion hole in finances, apart from the $96 billion deficit that we had to deal with, $90 billion of which had been accumulated as debt over the previous 13 years. We had to deal with a great deal of debt, as I strongly suspect we will have to deal with when we next take office, because this current government has no real, genuine, calculated intention of ever paying back the enormous amount of debt that has been accumulated in recent months. So let us get the record straight: there was no cancellation of the national dental health system by the Howard government. The national dental health system had been funded for a period of four years, after which it was expected by the previous Labor government that the state of dental health around the nation would be satisfactorily improved and the program would go back to the states to be funded by them, which was an absolutely proper strategy.

The member for Shortland in the conclusion to her contribution raised the issue of the alcopops tax and she contrasted that with our alternative proposal for fund raising: to increase tax tobacco. She glibly proposed firstly that the two situations were comparable and that the fact we would not support one and supported the other was a demonstration of hypocrisy. That was the only thing I could read into her delivery. The alcopops tax was introduced by the government as nothing more than a revenue-raising measure. They were going to pick up some $2 billion worth of additional revenue in the budget period as a result of hitting alcopops in particular, the ready-to-drink category of alcohol. The opposition coalition absolutely correctly resisted that heavy tax burden for those products because it had been presented by the Labor government as some sort of health measure that was miraculously going to reduce the amount of alcohol consumption by young people, particularly young women. What a farce that was. No such thing was true. There was no reduction in alcohol consumption. Overwhelmingly, the people who have come to me, especially the parents of young teenage girls, have said: ‘That introduction of an additional tax was an absolute failure. Now, my children spend less money on alcohol and consume more alcohol because suddenly they have realised they can go to a bottle shop and buy a 750 ml bottle of straight spirits and mix their own drinks. They get into a condition which can only be referred to as rolling drunk for much, much less because they mix their own drinks in unreasonable proportions and, in fact, they consume more alcohol in an evening than they would buying alcopops or ready-to-drink products, as they had in the past.’ So there was no reduction in the consumption of alcohol. If this unjustified additional tax is knocked off, hopefully, in the long term, the one thing that will be changed will be that the government will not be illegitimately raising another $2 billion.

The Hon. Malcolm Turnbull, the Leader of the Opposition, in his budget speech in reply on the Thursday following the budget proposed an additional tax on tobacco products. Proposing an additional tax on tobacco products is quite reasonable if you consider that we are talking about health issues. It is far more reasonable to raise revenue and put that revenue into the improvement of people’s health and the treatment of ill health than to simply slam those who are doing the right thing by affording their own health insurance to protect the public hospital system. So for the member for Shortland to suggest that our opposing the increased tax on alcopops is somehow at odds with proposing an additional tax on tobacco products is an absolute nonsense. If people were going to consume an alternative to cigarettes, for instance, they would still pay the tax.

Enough digressing; I will turn to the legislation at hand. What we are talking about tonight is the Fairer Private Health Insurance Incentives Bill 2009 and related Medicare levy surcharge bills. The very first point I have issue with is the title of this bill: ‘fairer’ private health insurance incentives. Frankly, I cannot see anything fairer about this proposition unless you have a particularly distorted view of the world. At the end of the day, this is an additional tax, an additional cost on those members of the public, those working Australians, who, when forced to analyse their particular position in the health system, back in 1997 when the Howard government proposed the Medicare surcharge, decided that if they could afford to take out private health insurance they ought to because they were going to suffer a financial penalty if they did not. As a result, many, many people joined the private health system and, because of that and the money that flowed into the private side of the health system, the pressure was taken off the public hospital system. That meant that those people who were on very low wages or in unfortunate circumstances and could not afford to buy private health insurance did not have the same waiting lists or queues for access to the public health system.

So to call this a ‘fairer’ private health insurance incentive when this philosophically socialist Labor government is now going to rip away that rebate from those who have acted independently and are prepared to support their own health through insurance is a nonsense. But it was no shock to me when this bill was introduced. I had said prior to the election in 2007 that this party could not be trusted with money, could not be trusted to govern for all Australians, could not be trusted to be fiscally responsible, regardless of the propaganda that we were fed. But I did not think they would go this far, because this legislation proposes to do something that, prior to the election, the Australian Labor Party said they would not do. But they have done it. We have had many, many other examples the last almost 18 months where they have gone back on their word, but I did not think they would actually do this.

They have almost tried to convince the Australian public, to cover up this proposition, that they are acting in some sort of Robin Hood role: they are going to rob from the rich to give to the poor. I think we as Australians have a pretty good sense of a fair go—and we have another adage along the lines of ‘a fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay’. But the leader of the current government, Prime Minister Rudd, is becoming well known now as the master of spin, and the Robin Hood robbing from the rich to give to the poor story is just another smokescreen. It is just another finely honed charade. This is not Robin Hood robbing from the rich to give to the poor; this is really the Sheriff of Nottingham redirecting funds from those who work hard and make a contribution to society and pay their way in the community—by helping those that cannot afford health insurance to a better, more accessible public health system. He is beating them around the head with it and doing it all behind a smokescreen. Those who cannot afford private health insurance which will allow them ready access to private health are now going to be penalised, because they will have less access to the public health system that exists. So the whole connotation of taking from the rich and giving to the poor is absolutely flawed.

It raises a further question: when the Prime Minister spoke glowingly and lovingly about his working families, saying he had to look after the Australians who were working families, he convinced many of us that he was genuine, and no-one really thought to question the definition of a ‘working family’. But, when you see legislation like this proposed, you start to wonder: just what is a ‘working family’? What does the government hold as a definition of their ‘working families’?

When this proposition was first revealed, numerous members of my staff said to me: ‘We’re not rich; we don’t have a wealthy family. My husband and I are working, we both work very hard and we pay health insurance. Sure, we earn in excess of $120,000 a year collectively, because we are in our working hard era, accumulating funds for a time when we have got a family. But we’re not rich.’ People all over my electorate are coming to me and saying: ‘You introduced, whilst in government, the rebate that was going to reward those persons who did the right thing and insured themselves against health situations in the future. How do you feel now that the government is proposing to take this rebate away?’ I say, ‘I’m angry; I’m very angry,’ because it flies in the face of what was promised before the election. Thousands of Australians took the promise at face value and said, ‘Well, we don’t have to worry about this being another high-taxing, big-spending government, because they said they won’t be.’ That is what makes me angry. When people go back on their word, it is great cause for anger.

I say to the people who come and complain to me, ‘The role of a good opposition is to highlight the failings of government, to highlight their broken promises, to highlight the fact that they say they will do one thing and then in fact do another.’ So we bring this issue up. Whether or not we will be able to stop this piece of legislation going through is yet to be seen, but there is no way that anyone who believes in a fair go could accept this legislation as being either honourable or necessary. There are other ways to raise these funds, and this government ought look to them.

We have had some statistics analysing all of the Australian federal electorates and the numbers of people in those electorates who have private health insurance. The member for Shortland raised the fact that she had a printout that had been provided to her by the Australian Health Insurance Association. I think she tried to make the point that the passage of this legislation would have a minor impact on her constituency because, as she read the stats, there were very few people in her electorate that had private health insurance. For the benefit of the member for Shortland, I can assure the House that in the electorate of Kalgoorlie there are some 63,000 people that are covered by private health insurance. Those people are primarily what the Rudd government would refer to as ‘rich people’. They are rich people; they are not working families by his definition. So they are going to have the 30 per cent rebate ripped away from them and they are going to be none too happy about that outcome.

The fact that many more than 50 per cent of my electorate bother to spend their hard-earned money on private health insurance is significant. But what is more significant is that there are no private health facilities across the Kalgoorlie electorate. That is, in 91 per cent of Western Australia—in 2.3 million square kilometres—there are no private health facilities. So why do my hard-working families take out private health insurance? Let me tell you.

They do so because they know that they are only going to keep earning so long as they keep working and, if they have an incident that requires immediate, good private medical attention, they have spent their money on that insurance and they will be able to access in a timely manner the health services they need in the city of Perth. They know full well that they will not get that private health service in the electorate but they will be able to go and get that health service as they need it because the private sector of health provides those facilities in the metropolitan area and charges for them and, if one is privately insured, the insurance company will pay. That is a system that was able to evolve when the Howard government salvaged the health system in this country after the near ruination of the 80s and 90s under Labor.

Labor would take us back to those days. They would take us back to the days of poor access, long queues, long lists and the ‘you’ll get repaired when we’ve got the time to repair you’ attitude. But it has been done under the smokescreen of Robin Hood robbing from the filthy rich, who do not deserve any consideration from government, and giving to the poor, who deserve every consideration from this government. If that does not reek of socialism, I’ll go ‘Hee!’.

The reality is that people are prepared to spend the money they work hard to earn to take out a private health insurance premium because they know (a) they can avoid the Medicare surcharge and (b) they will get a 30 per cent rebate. It is not an enormous rebate and the cost of private health insurance today is very substantial. Those people deserve to be respected by this government. They do not deserve to have this government go back on the beliefs they stated before the election that they would not increase taxes. This is nothing more than another financial hit on hard-working Australian families, the very same families that this government said it would protect.

Debate (on motion by Mr Anthony Smith) adjourned.

See this speech in context