Julia Gillard (Lalor, Australian Labor Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the member for La Trobe for her question. Earlier today the House of Representatives passed the government's changes to the private health insurance rebate and there is every reason to believe that these changes will pass through the Senate. These changes were first brought to the parliament in 2009. We sought to secure these changes then and took this plan to the 2010 election and said, as the government, that we wanted to work to change the private health insurance rebate in the interest of fairness and in the interest of sustainability. Today the House of Representatives has given a tick to fairness and a tick to sustainability. It is clearly unfair to ask low-income Australians who cannot afford private health insurance themselves to subsidise the private health insurance of people who are many times better off than they are—clearly unfair.

Mr Christensen interjecting—

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