Peter Dutton (Dickson, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Health and Ageing) Share this | Hansard source

As I was saying, in relation to this bill, and for the benefit of the member, the reason that we have private health insurance in this country is that if we force people out of private health insurance by not bringing measures like this into the parliament then our public system would collapse. The difficulty is that this government seems wont to crash the private health insurance market in this country. If the government puts these bills up as a genuine attempt to try to help people stay in private health insurance, then they provide ways in which we can manage our health system into the future for this country.

If the honourable member opposite seriously believes that we should not be supporting the 11 million Australians in private health insurance—if the Labor Party believes that we should be crashing the private health insurance market—that would be a devastating day for the health system in this country. The previous government was able to increase coverage of people with health insurance and therefore relieve some of that pressure experienced by our public hospitals. This is a concept that clearly escapes the honourable member opposite, as she flees the chamber to get an additional briefing before she speaks so that she can at least give some semblance of a contribution to this debate.

The important point is that waiting lists are crushing older Australians in particular around this country. If we force people out of private health insurance and into the public system, it will only make for a more devastating situation. People who are now waiting years for treatment in the public system will wait years longer if people are not taking out private health insurance and sharing some of the burden into the future. It would be an amazing situation to see this Rudd Labor government return to the devastating days in the private health insurance market that we saw in the Hawke-Keating years, when Labor really was determined to crush private health insurance in this country.

About one million Australians on incomes of $26,000 a year or less have private health insurance in this country. They will be impacted directly by the Rudd government’s decision. The government projects that the changes it has made to private health insurance will raise about $1.9 billion over four years, which will make private health insurance premiums higher for all Australians. I mentioned earlier in my speech on this debate that the government, on its own figures, projects that about 40,000 people will drop out of private health insurance, but at the same time the government claims that it will raise about $1.9 billion in revenue over four years, or about $500 million per annum. How is it that $500 million is going to be obtained from 40,000 people dropping out of private health insurance? It is a nonsense. Hundreds of thousands of Australians will grin and bear the extra premiums, but they will remain in private health insurance. They might be older Australians, and pensioners in particular, who are concerned about the deterioration of their health and the conditions and complications that might approach as they age. They might be people who are planning to start a family and want to have cover. It may be that many families around the country, regardless of their financial status, are scared about the situation in our hospitals and that is the reason they maintain their private health insurance. Whatever the reason, we should be encouraging people into private health insurance because it offsets the debt that would otherwise be ultimately incurred by the taxpayer.

That is why I say, particularly for the benefit of the member for Shortland, that it is good to have people offsetting some of their own costs in relation to health. If people pulled out of private health insurance today and went into the public health system, it would collapse overnight. This government’s intention to wreck the system is unsustainable and it is un-Australian. We need to make sure that we take the fight up to the government.

I say to those 11 million Australians who are going to face higher health insurance premiums into the future: write to your local member of parliament and make sure your voice is heard. It is very difficult indeed for young families, for older Australians and for people on low and middle incomes to maintain private health insurance cover at a time of economic difficulty, not just in this country but in other parts of the world, even without the additional burden of extra and higher insurance premiums. This will make it more difficult for people to balance their budgets, and ultimately a crunch point will come. When that crunch point comes, if people drop out of private health insurance, with the Prime Minister not having lived up to his promise to fix public hospitals, that will put even greater strain on those wonderful people—the doctors and nurses and other allied health professionals—who on a daily basis perform in an environment which for many of them remains completely intolerable. Many of the doctors and nurses that I have spoken to around the country are devastated by the conditions in which they are expected to work.

This is a country which should be providing better health outcomes to the Australian public. The government should acknowledge that it would be much preferable if we had better hospital environments in particular for people to work in. On that basis, the coalition supports the bill.

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