Jamie Briggs (Mayo, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker, for the opportunity to speak this evening on the Fairer Private Health Insurance Incentives Bill 2009 and cognate bills.This is a very important debate on private health insurance and the government’s ideologically based approach to destroying the private health insurance industry. This is a policy that has been dressed up as Robin Hood, but in reality it is the first step down a path of destroying the private health system in Australia. I will deal with that in more detail later in the speech.

The 30 per cent rebate was a very wise policy move by the former government. It instituted one of its key promises in the 1996 election campaign, because it understood that if you could take pressure off the public health system by making the private health system more affordable for people, particularly young families and older people, you would indeed be making it better for those at the lower end who could not afford private health insurance.

We hear much from the other side that this is middle-class or high-end welfare, but what they simply fail to understand is that this policy actually helps more at the lower end than it does at the top end. It is also a very important policy to my electorate, the electorate of Mayo. According to figures I have received, in my electorate 85,000 people have private health insurance. According to the research I have, 60,886 of them are voters, but 85,000 are covered, which makes a percentage of 62 per cent, which is quite a high percentage, as I understand it, compared to other electorates. That is not because my seat is particularly wealthy. Indeed, it is at the opposite end. I have quite an old electorate. I have the oldest council district in the country, in Victor Harbor, and there are a lot of retirees down in that area, particularly pensioners. Kangaroo Island, which is a great part of our country, is also low socioeconomically. So people are sacrificing for private health insurance because they know it gives them better treatment. It gives them the treatment that they desire.

If we dig down on the figures I have, about 50,000 voters in my electorate, which is about 52 per cent of the electorate, have hospital treatment insurance: singles, 13,000; families, 18,000; and all persons, 70,000. Families are an important number in this respect because pregnancy is a very important time for young families. My family have private health insurance and we chose to have our two children in private hospitals; in fact, our first child was born in John James Hospital here in Canberra. In terms of general treatment insurance, 58,000 voters in my electorate have that, which is 60 per cent of my electorate. So I make the point that it is a very important policy issue in my electorate and that this legislation is a real attack on my electorate and my constituents. It is a very disappointing attack by those on the other side, who seek to claim that they represent the working class, but we know that it is really an attack on the private health insurance industry. It is dressed up as Robin Hood politics, as I said earlier and as many of my colleagues have said. But the facts are that for every rebated dollar, a privately insured person contributes two more to our health system as a whole, which really makes the point that when state governments around the country simply cannot manage the hospital system, when the waiting lists are appalling and the treatment received at times is disturbingly lacklustre, we do need another stream of health care. In particular, we need pressure taken off the public hospitals so the hard-working doctors and nurses in the public hospital system dealing with emergencies can get on and do so.

In the time available this evening I want to deal with election promises. Non-core election promises was something that those on the other side of the House used to sprout all about quite often when they were on this side of the House. We used to hear them campaigning regularly against the former Prime Minister for non-core promises, which was a reference to a series of promises that the previous government had to wind back after they were elected in 1996 because when they got into government there simply was not the money. The debt at that point was about $96 billion. In today’s terms that is not very much, but in those days it was a significant shock to the government, along with the big black hole of a $10 billion budget deficit. That forced the then government of Prime Minister Howard and the member for Higgins, the former Treasurer, to go back and look at the promises they had made. That was the right thing to do because they needed to get the budget back in the black, which the coalition did. There was a time a couple of years ago when the budget was in surplus, with money in the bank—but there is a television ad at the moment which tells us about that, so I will not press on on that issue.

So some tough decisions were required by the previous government, and the Labor Party, opportunistically, voted on this side of the House against every one of those tough decisions—an interesting point to raise, given the current debate going on day after day in question time. They would vote against every measure to reduce the debt that they had given this country and that they had not told the Australian people about during that election campaign, but a debt that had to be addressed nonetheless. This side of the parliament did so and put us back in surplus with money in the bank. The former Prime Minister and former Treasurer had the intestinal fortitude to stand up and say, ‘We have to get rid of certain promises, we have to change tack on certain issues because the money is not there, we have to make some tough decisions.’

Compare that to the behaviour of the current incumbent in the office who, the day after the budget, went on Neil Mitchell’s program on Radio 3AW. That is a very difficult interview for senior politicians; I grant the Prime Minister that. However, I will quote from the transcript put out by the Prime Minister’s office:

Mitchell: Will you apologise to the Australian people for directly breaking the promises you made before the election?

PM: Neil I accept full responsibility for that and for not being able to fulfil some of those policy commitments.

Mitchell: It is not that, it is the promises broken.

PM: No, no policy commitments.

Mitchell: Promises broken, Prime Minister.

PM: Policy commitments that we haven’t fulfilled …

We could go on. So we see a Prime Minister unable to take responsibility for breaking an election promise, and this was a rolled-gold election promise. A letter sent by the then opposition leader—now Prime Minister—on 20 November 2007, days before the election, was in response to the Australian Health Insurance Association’s seeking clarification on federal Labor’s policy regarding private health insurance, said:

Both my Shadow Minister for Health, Nicola Roxon and I have made clear on many occasions this year that Federal Labor is committed to retaining the existing private health insurance rebates, including the 30 per cent general rebate and 35 and 40 per cent rebates for older Australians.

That does seem to be a clear broken promise. That seemed to be a pretty strong commitment there from the then opposition leader. But, not content with that, when he was elected Prime Minister he reassured the Australian public in February 2008 at a press conference in the grand prime ministerial courtyard:

The private health insurance rebate policy remains unchanged and will remain unchanged.

So we see a clear breach of trust; a rolled-gold election promise broken. That in itself is not necessarily a bad reflection on the Prime Minister because sometimes governments do need to change tack. We all admit that. It is probably better to put it to an election, but on occasions there is a need to change policies when circumstances change. However, you need to take responsibility for it and you need to be honest about it, and that is not what we see from this Prime Minister.

I put to the House that what this is actually about is that the Labor Party have wanted to do this for some time. This is not a new idea. As I understand from sources inside Treasury, this was put up last year to the Treasurer as a savings measure and was one of the last to go. Only those on the other side would know the real answer on that. But we do know from the history of the Labor Party that they are quite opposed to the private health insurance rebate. They voted against it in the first place and they have been critics of it for some time, although in recent years they softened that criticism because they realised that this policy was publicly quite popular. The truth is that, in particular, the Deputy Prime Minister believes in the public health system more than in any private health insurance system, particularly a rebate for it.

You just have to look at their form. Like you do with a good horse, you have to go back and look at their form on this. So I did go back and look at their form. As members would remember, there were two big issues in the 2004 campaign from those on the other side when the former member for Werriwa, Mark Latham, was the Labor leader. There were two big policy announcements. The first was the schools hit list, and that did not go so well—again, that was a key Labor belief—and the second was Medicare Gold. Medicare Gold was announced, if my memory serves me correctly, about 10 days out from the election, about the Thursday before the election, I believe. It was the Frankenstein child of the current Deputy Prime Minister and her then leader, Mark Latham. Members will remember that the member for Lalor was widely credited as being the chief backer when the former member for Werriwa defeated the roosters’ candidate in December 2003. They then worked very closely together on this. The Deputy Prime Minister was the shadow health spokesperson then and she worked on this policy.

For those who have forgotten, the detail of the Medicare Gold policy was that it would give free health care to those over 75. It was a massive budgetary move that would have cost the country a fortune, but it was designed to destroy the private health insurance system. I referred last Monday to the history of Australian elections and the recent 2007 election. I have gone back to another take on the 2004 election written by one of the participants, actually—Mark Latham. In The Latham Diaries, he writes about the Medicare Gold policy:

Medicare Gold was in the same category as the tax and family policy: it wasn’t ready until the campaign. It combined my plan for killing the private health insurance rebate with Duckett and Swerissen’s vision for extending Federal responsibilities in hospital care. It required a lot of work to model the private insurance indications and to secure the cooperation of the states, all handled by Gillard—

that is, the current Deputy Prime Minister. He goes on:

Gillard always referred to it as ‘the policy that dare not speak its name’ …

And of course that is the strategy from those on the other side. They want to sneakily get rid of private health insurance, particularly the rebate. That is the real desire of the Labor Party in government: to move on these things they hold dear to their hearts. I must say, all of those on the other side—with the exception of the member for Fowler, who is always very honest about her views on policy issues; I think we all acknowledge that—have been opposed to the private health insurance rebate for forever and a day. The member for Fowler is not arguing; I think that is a fair point!

That is the background to this policy decision. It is not all about this budget; it is something they have wanted to do since coming to government. It was not something they could announce in the election campaign, and The Latham Diaries confirm that that was what they are out to do—destroy the private health insurance rebate. We are very grateful that the former leader wrote his version of events in 2004!

So this measure is about two things. Firstly, it is about Labor’s hatred of the private insurance rebate, although the private health insurance rebate is good policy. It takes pressure off the public health system and helps those who cannot afford private health insurance by taking more people out of the public system. That is a good thing for the health system in this country. And this is a dividing line in Australian politics. We on this side of the House believe very strongly in the private health insurance rebate and the private health insurance industry—those on the other side, not so much. Secondly, it is about this government’s inability to manage the economy. This is one of a series of revenue-raising measures, although it is only $1.9 billion over four years and that will be but a small drop in a bucket in trying to attack this debt of $315 billion and rising. It is about the Labor Party’s ideological opposition to private health insurance and it is the signal that they have lost control of the economy. We have seen spiralling debt, we see a spiralling deficit and we see no plan to manage the economy properly. From opposition, the former Leader of the Opposition was able to offer a reasonable alternative which was also addressing a health concern.

I have noticed members on the other side are trying to draw a parallel between our opposition to the alcopops tax—and I firmly opposed the alcopops tax—and our suggestion to raise the tax on cigarettes. As a Liberal I do not like raising taxes, but in 1996 we had to do it when there was such a huge debt and deficit. Firstly, the alcopops issue was about addressing one aspect of alcohol rather than alcohol across the board. Secondly, it was dressed up as a health policy when really it was a revenue measure, as we said all along. Now we hear the Labor Party saying, ‘The opposition found a revenue measure in cigarettes.’ Well, of course, that is what the alcopops tax was. All they have to do is be honest about that and admit that, but of course they cannot.

What we have seen from this government is an inability to manage this economy. We are seeing spiralling debt. We are seeing them going back to their true beliefs, with the Deputy Prime Minister and her comrades seeking to destroy the private health insurance system. This is a bad piece of policy. It will impact enormously on my constituency in Mayo, 62 per cent of whom, as I said earlier, have private health insurance—quite a high rate of private health insurance cover. It is very disappointing to see a government make this decision. We on this side of the House stand starkly opposed to this decision. We just hope desperately that the Labor government can get their house in order and start managing this economy properly.

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