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

Firstly, I will read a few quotes which I think are instructive in terms of the government's mismanagement and, frankly, deception when it comes to private health insurance. The first quote is from the then Minister for Health and Ageing, Nicola Roxon, who on 24 February 2009 said:

The Government is firmly committed to retaining the existing private health insurance rebates.

I take you back to 25 February 2008, when Kevin Rudd was quoted as saying:

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

In fact, it was Mr Rudd as then Leader of the Opposition in November 2007 who 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 the 35 and 40 per cent rebates for older Australians.

I take you to Ms Roxon's press release on 26 September 2007:

On many occasions for many months, Federal Labor has made it crystal clear that we are committed to retaining all of the existing private health insurance rebates, including the 30 per cent general rebate and the 35 and 40 per cent rebates for older Australians.

I take you to statements made on Meet the Press, Network Ten, on Sunday, 23 September 2007 during an interview by Steve Lewis of the then health minister and soon-to-be-retired member for Gellibrand. Steve Lewis said:

Let's move to another integral part of the health system, the private health rebate, the 30% rebate. Labor has said "Yes, we will keep it," but you have not said whether you will keep it in total. Can you say now that Labor, if elected, will maintain all of the ancillary measures that encompass the private health rebate?

Nicola Roxon:

Yes, I can. We've committed to it. We've committed to the 30%. We've committed to the 35% and 40% for older Australians. It's similar to this safety net. We know that many people rely heavily on the assistance that is now provided and would not be able to have private health insurance if that rebate wasn't paid.

And lifetime health cover and others that go with it, we are committed to those. We understand that Australia now has a mixed health system, both private and public, and we need them both to be strong in order for the community to be able to get the services.

Steve Lewis followed up with this question:

So you will not wind back that 30% private health rebate, despite the fact that Labor has been ideologically opposed to it in the past?

Nicola Roxon:

No, we won't.

That gives us the detail of the former prime minister's position and the former health minister's position.

Let me take you to the current Prime Minister's position stated when she was the shadow minister for health in opposition:

On Thursday, October 13, the Minister for Health, Tony Abbott, asserted in parliament that prior to the last election, I had a secret plan to scrap the private health insurance rebate and he cited Mark Latham's diaries as proof of this proposition. Yesterday, Matt Price reported this claim by the minister as if it were a fact. The claim by the minister is completely untrue and should not have been reported as if it were true. The truth is that I never had a secret plan to scrap the private health insurance rebate, and contrary to Mr Latham's diaries, do not support such a claim … For all Australians who wanted to have private health insurance, the private health insurance rebate would have remained under a Labor government. I gave an iron-clad guarantee of that during the election. The difference between Tony 'rock solid, iron-clad' Abbott and me is that when I make an 'iron-clad commitment', I actually intend on keeping it.

The word that needs to be underscored in that quote is 'intend', because this Prime Minister has intended to do a lot of things. She intended to have no carbon tax. At the time of the last election this Prime Minister made the promise to the Australian people that there would be no carbon tax, but of course there was. This Prime Minister promised that there would be no changes to the private health insurance rebates. Of course, under her watch there have been. There have been consistent attacks when it comes to private health insurance, and it did not stop there. In a letter to the editor of the Courier Mail on 23 September 2004 the current Prime Minister said:

Your correspondent Russell McGregor should have no concern that Labor will 'erode' or abolish the 30 per cent government rebate for private health insurance. Labor is committed to the maintenance of this rebate and I have given an iron-clad guarantee of that on a number of occasions.

On 2 September, the current Prime Minister, as shadow minister for health, in a letter to the editor of the Hobart Mercury said:

I grow tired of saying this—Labor is committed to the 30 per cent private health insurance rebate.

Of course, we now find out that this is a government that has attacked private health insurance at every single turn. It does not matter whether it is this Prime Minister, the former prime minister or a future Labor prime minister, this Labor Party is ideologically opposed to private health insurance in this country, and all Australians can now see that.

There are a couple of bills before the parliament at the moment, and I want to touch, firstly, on the Private Health Insurance Amendment (Lifetime Health Cover Loading and Other Measures) Bill 2012. Again these changes go completely in the face of what this government has provided over a long period of time.

Who will be most affected by these changes? It will not be the rich that the Labor Party believe hold private health insurance policies and that somehow private health insurance is the playground of the rich. This will attack and drive up premium prices for people on all incomes that have private health insurance. So the 5.6 million people with private health insurance who have an annual household income of less than $50,000 and 3.4 million who have an annual household income of less than $35,000 will be among those who will be impacted by this cruel and callous change by this incompetent government.

Overall, 10.6 million Australians have hospital cover in this country, and if we do not have a good balance between the public and private system then this will be the demise of private health insurance in this country as we know it. We know one thing for sure. We know that when Labor was last in power between 1983 and 1986 Labor drove private health insurance coverage down to the low 30s, and they seek to do the same again. What all Australians have to know is that this government is not the friend of those who are privately insured, not the friend of those who seek to take some care for their own health needs. This is a government that at every turn has sought to destroy health insurance as we know it in this country. We also note that the full effect of the means-testing changes per se have not just been felt, because we know that PHIAC, the government agency, reported $1.2 billion in pre-payments in the June quarter as people attempted to defer the resulting premium increases. So we know that many of the changes that people will make either to downgrade their policy or indeed to exit private health insurance are yet to hit the system.

This government is absolutely denying the obvious. The obvious is that it is an environment where people have huge cost of living pressures, where people have electricity prices going up because of the carbon tax, where their petrol prices are going up because of the carbon tax, where if they are in small business they are facing the impost of the carbon tax every time the delivery truck arrives at the back door. We know that every time the lights are turned on in aged-care facilities, we know that every time an emergency department needs to operate, as they do 24 hours a day in many hospitals around the country, the impost of the carbon tax is felt. And we know that through all of those cost of living pressures that ultimately are borne by consumers in this country it makes it harder, not easier, for people to pay their private health insurance.

Why would this government want to slug people with private health insurance? First, as I say, because they are ideologically opposed to private health insurance but, secondly, because they have wasted billions of dollars. If you want to know why the government have made change after change in a negative way to the health system in this country, not just in private health insurance but elsewhere, it is because they are desperate for cash. This government racked up well over $300 billion of debt. They are marching through that self-imposed ceiling because they have wasted billions of dollars and therefore they have had to rip money out of the pockets of patients in this country to try and patch up their dodgy budget that was announced only a couple of weeks ago by this incompetent and discredited Treasurer.

This bill is no different. This bill provides savings, and that is why the coalition will oppose the lifetime health cover loading and other measures bill, because this government seeks to attack these privately insured yet again. We know that if the government had its way it would collapse private health insurance in this country. That is the policy of the Greens as well, because they seek to destroy private health insurance in this country. We have fought Labor as best we can at every turn. At every turn we have said to the Labor Party that this will have a negative impact. Wherever we can we have opposed those bills, sometimes unsuccessfully, but we continue to try and hold this bad government to account. The means-testing changes previously introduced by the government have already created around 12 different pricing structures for premiums. This government at whatever chance it has been given has tried to make more complex the offering of private health insurance products in this country and people know that this is a government that is not wedded to private health insurance.

The bill ceases direct claiming of the private health insurance rebate through the Department of Human Services, known as the incentives payment scheme. This is to take effect on 1 July 2013. The coalition acknowledges that very few people access the rebate through the scheme and 99.9 per cent of rebate claims are said to be made by the premium reduction scheme or through tax offset claiming. It is claimed that this will reduce somewhat the administrative burden for the Department of Human Services, insurers and the ATO.

As I say, we have tried wherever we can to hold this bad government to account, and I want to now turn very quickly to the second bill for discussion, the Private Health Insurance Legislation Amendment (Base Premium) Bill 2013. It is true that this government is in its dying days. There is no question about the fact that this government has let down 23 million Australians. The members opposite are under enormous pressure as they travel around the country because not just in health but across portfolios we have seen daily evidence of their incompetence when they say one thing before the election but they do another thing after, of their incompetence when they say to Australian families, 'You have to tighten your belt because this is a tight economic environment,' and yet at the same time families see this government wasting billions of dollars. They say to the Australian public, 'These are tough times and we have to cut back on certain areas,' and yet the public see this government going out and spending money in advertising programs. This is a government that goes from bad to worse, and what we are seeing in the dying days is not considered legislation that it brings before this parliament but simply an ideological attack, and this bill is no different.

The problem is that this government has racked up, as I said before, significant debt. When Peter Costello and John Howard came into government in 1996 they were inheriting a debt of $96 billion. It took 10 years to pay that debt off. Over the course of 1996 until the government lost office in 2007, when Mr Rudd was elected as prime minister, we ran up $70 billion of net assets, not debt

We left this government with $70 billion of net assets. Not only that; it had $20 billion in the bank. And what do we know now, only five or six short years later? We know that this government or a future government is going to have to seek approval to push the debt ceiling out beyond $300 billion, and yet this government started with no net debt and with money in the bank.

We now know that this government has at every attempt tried to patch up the dodgy figures, but finally a fortnight ago the figures caught up with this Treasurer. They promised on hundreds of occasions that they would deliver a surplus. They never did. And do you know what, Mr Deputy Speaker? They never will. They have not delivered a surplus since 1989. They promise a surplus in every year. They did it during the Hawke and Keating years. They have done it every year. And this Treasurer will go down not only as the worst Treasurer in Australia's history but also as a Treasurer who promised a surplus every year but failed to deliver one in any. That is why we find ourselves in a very difficult position in the dying days of this government. They are proposing bad policy, but all of us are mugged by the reality of the debt that they have created. So they are rushing through legislation that is not properly thought out, and we have grave concerns about a lot of what this government is doing and in relation to this bill we are debating at this point in time.

We have a party process that we need to go through. The government have rushed this bill on for their own political end, not having any consideration whatsoever for the conventions as they operate in this place, and we will have a discussion within our party room tomorrow, which is the normal course of events for legislation to be decided by the party room. Then we can make further comments on this bill. But have no doubt about it: this bill is designed by the government not to try to improve the lot of private health insurance; in fact, this is a detrimental bill, and we acknowledge that. This is a detrimental bill by a bad government; it comes, though, at a significant savings of almost $700 million to the government, so it is not insignificant in the money it proposes to save for the Commonwealth.

But I say again to the Australian public that this is a government that has a proven track record not just over the course of the last five or six years but also over the 13 years when they were previously in government. That was to attack at every opportunity those Australians who have private health insurance. I can say with confidence as we run into the next election that private health insurance premiums will always be more expensive under a Labor government than they will under a coalition government. The coalition, both in government and now in opposition, have made every attempt possible to provide support to those 10½ million Australians who are privately insured. We want to make sure that we get a good balance between public and private health in this country, and I want to make sure that, if we win the election, we have the greatest capacity to strip every dollar away from these new bureaucratic structures that the government has created, away from the wasteful spending programs and put it into areas like private health insurance, trying to beef up our primary care response, trying to rebuild general practice that this government has sought at every turn to tear down.

I can say with confidence that this coalition will not tolerate the excesses of the bureaucratic spend that this government has presided over, over the course of the last six years. Yes, we have hardworking and well-intentioned health officials at the Commonwealth level in this country. The problem is that we cannot afford to continue growing at the 30 per cent that the Labor Party has presided over, over the course of the last six years. If we do that—if we are spending billions of dollars on the dozen or so new bureaucratic structures that have been created—it starves us of the opportunity to help people who have been unwell and, in particular, the aged in this country, who want to get in to see a doctor on time, who do not want to languish on elective surgery waiting lists for years, who do not want to wait with sick children in emergency departments for hours upon hours. But part of the reason we have some of those outcomes in our health system is that Labor makes a deliberate decision to placate the unions and to build up the numbers within bureaucratic structures. That will not be tolerated if the coalition is elected. Our argument to the Australian people will be that we can manage the health portfolio more effectively than this party.

I close on this note: if the coalition is successful at the September election, our desire will be to rebuild general practice and to get a good balance between the public and private system in this country. But we will have tough decisions to make—tough decisions because of the debt that this government has thrust us into, and that relates to this bill as much as it does to other bills that come before us. The government really has thrust us into an urgent situation because of the debt that they have racked up, and that makes decisions very difficult for all of us in this place just as it does for families and small business people around the country. That is the situation that Labor has created, as they always do in government. It seems that history demonstrates to us that it is always then upon the shoulders of a coalition government to right the wrongs of a bad Labor government.

See this speech in context