John Cobb (Calare, National Party, Shadow Minister for Agriculture and Food Security) Share this | Hansard source

They most certainly do and all their actions show it. They totally ignore that, through private schools and private health, taxpayers are saved an enormous amount, an amount taken on by individuals and organisations—schools, medical facilities, whatever they might be. People in the bush are already at a disadvantage. For our regional communities private health insurance is a godsend. I have already said that there is a lack of hospitals. Many hospitals are understaffed and that is supplemented by the fact that private hospitals take a load off the system. That system may be overloaded in the cities but city services are pretty good compared with what is available in regional Australia and regional New South Wales in particular.

Forty per cent of regional Australians hold private health insurance and over 50 per cent of all Australians overall. In the Calare electorate, it is something over one-third. That is a third of the population that, by and large, do not have to overload the public hospital system any more.

People insure themselves knowing that, should they be diagnosed with a serious health condition, they have the security of a doctor and treatment when they need it and that that is something they have paid for, mostly, over many years.

The availability of specialist services is one of the most serious implications of not having private health insurance. Without doubt, private hospitals help the public system attract a number of specialists in a region and they tend to work together to make it much more viable for a specialist to operate in a country town. The fact that the private health system is there financially helps doctors more, but most of them are very keen and very willing to work in the public system as well.

The two systems need one another, which is what makes it crazy to deliberately decide to downsize that which we all need. As I have said before, regional Australia needs it more, even though fewer of us are in it than are in it in the cities. In Calare, for example, there are four private hospitals. We almost lost one a couple of years ago with the closure of St Vincent's Private Hospital in Bathurst. The closure came as an enormous shock to the region as it would have been without an essential centre and that would have totally overloaded not just Bathurst's system but Orange's major hospital system as well. Fortunately, through a joint venture between Orange Day Surgery Centre and Day Procedures Australia, the hospital was able to continue operating as the Bathurst Private Hospital. There are still ongoing discussions regarding the redevelopment of the health service.

When you say something political when it is obviously so much about politics, you get accused of being cynical, but I am deeply concerned that, should this Labor government continue on its warpath of harming private health insurance, the longevity of Calare's private hospitals, without a shadow of a doubt, will be threatened and we may gradually see the deterioration of our limited private health services until we are left with none.

The one thing that sticks out like a sore thumb in all this is that, while Labor are eager and willing to pull a couple of billion dollars a year out of the private health system and out of contributing to its longevity, they are not putting that money back into the public health system, which will have to immediately deal with the overflow of people who move from private to public health. To me, that does not say anything about caring for people; it says a lot about trying to get yourself out of a black hole by playing with people's medical futures.

While there may be few, private hospitals act as an essential hub for regional healthcare delivery. As I said, the over 33 per cent of residents of Calare who have private health insurance are using these services, and it is these families and individuals who can ill afford to lose the benefits they have enjoyed over the past decade, relieving the public system of an awful burden that it would have to bear without any extra funding to deal with it. Those who can no longer afford private health insurance will abandon insurance policies and rely on our already strained public health system. This will mean longer waiting times in our hospitals and reduced access to health services for the already disadvantaged members of the community.

This Gillard Labor government is once again attacking middle Australians, who are already battling with the rising costs of living. When you drive up interest rates by borrowing $100 million a day you are not going to make things much easier for Middle Australia. For the sake of the Calare community and wider regional Australia—not to mention our whole country—this legislation needs to be buried.

All Australians should have access to affordable health care and a real choice in managing their healthcare needs. This is what the coalition supports and will continue to support—providing all Australians with choice through private health insurance. The reason for this rebate was to not overload the public health system. The reason for it was to keep people in the private health scheme, not because it is elitist but because it is necessary. The public system is incredibly expensive. That goes without saying. All medicine is. They are going to overload it because of the money they are going to save and there has not been one word about putting it back into the public system, which will immediately become even more overloaded.

Every dollar of funding provided for the private health insurance rebate saves $2 of costs that are then paid by private health insurers. Those with private health insurance make up a huge 52 per cent of Australia's population—12 million Australians. Of these, 10.3 million have hospital treatment cover. As I said, over one-third of Calare's people will either leave private health insurance altogether or downgrade, seeking cheaper products, which will have second-round effects for public hospitals.

I think the crossbenchers need to think awfully carefully about this policy, given their regional nature. I am not saying it is not going to affect people in the cities. Of course it will. It will overload the public system in the cities as well. But the public system in regional Australia, particularly in New South Wales, is in a worse state than in the cities. Those crossbenchers—who are, by and large, from regional Australia—need to think this through very carefully. They might have defied their electorates before and think they have got away with it, but I can assure them they have not. And they will not get away with this one. With people abandoning or downgrading their health cover, the cost of private health insurance will become so high that it will be beyond the reach of lower income earners. On all of the coalition's and independent analysis calculations, there are no benefits in cutting the private health insurance rebate. It is obvious that they are not going to save money. They are going to have to put more money into the public system when they drive more people into it. So it is obviously not about money. This is about the idea that people should not have private hospitals and should not have private schools. Why? It is in the taxpayers'—

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