Steven Ciobo (Moncrieff, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

We have made that claim, and I note groans coming from the member opposite, but unfortunately Labor have form in this area. The Labor Party might groan about it while they sit in the chamber and they might like to pretend that in some way they have even passing interest in private health insurance, but the simple reality is that it is not supported by the facts.

I took the opportunity to run through some of the historical comments made by the some of the senior members of the Australian Labor Party. Nicola Roxon, on 24 February 2009, said in The Age:

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

Kevin Rudd, in a press conference on 25 February 2008, shortly after he was elected as Prime Minister of the country, said:

The Private Health Insurance Rebate policy remains unchanged and will remain unchanged.

Kevin Rudd said further, in a letter to the Australian Health Insurance Association in November 2007:

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.

There are many examples of what Labor has said historically. Some might even remember the Prime Minister of the country standing and saying down the barrel of the cameras, six days out from the last election, 'There will be no carbon tax under a government I lead.' But, unfortunately, what is endemic—and some might even say, in keeping with the health analogy, pandemic—across the Labor Party is an inability to remain consistent or to tell the truth when it comes to policy positions of Labor. As with each of these statements from senior Labor figures and as with the current Prime Minister of the country, who said, 'There will be no carbon tax under a government I lead,' the simple reality is that you cannot trust this divided and dysfunctional government to remain true to its word.

Labor have at their core a philosophical problem with private health insurance, because they have at their core a philosophical problem with private health full stop. Do not just take my word for it. The former Leader of the Australian Labor Party Mark Latham belled the cat when he wrote in his diaries about the current Prime Minister's pathological obsession with tearing apart private health insurance. I quote from a letter to the editor from Julia Gillard in The Weekend Australian of 15 October 2005. Among a number of points in her letter, she says:

The claim by the minister—

and at that stage that was the current Leader of the Opposition, Tony Abbott—

is completely untrue and should not have been reported as if it were true.

That claim was that Labor were going to tear apart the private health insurance rebate. I go on quoting the current Prime Minister:

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.

She goes on:

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.

So we know that even Mark Latham, the former Leader of the Australian Labor Party, was concerned about the current Prime Minister's view on private health insurance. But once again there were the dulcet tones of the current Prime Minister—I am being generous, perhaps—making the claim that Labor had no intention to do anything about private health insurance or in any way to erode private health insurance.

But what do we know now? After six years of Labor—after they have had the ability to demonstrate their ironclad commitment to private health insurance and have had the opportunity on a repeated basis to demonstrate how fundamental they believe the private health insurance rebate to be—we have seen six years of erosion of support for private health insurance. Labor have taken every opportunity they have had to in some way remove or erode support for private health insurance. The bills before the House today are simply the latest nail in the coffin when it comes to the private health insurance rebate and support for private health insurance across Australia.

A number of people would say: 'Why is this so important? You Liberals and Nationals—the coalition—seem to be so obsessed with private health insurance.' The reason it is important is because, unfortunately, following six years of Labor, we have a situation that has arisen where Australia's debt profile has gone from having no debt and $20 billion surpluses under the coalition to now having debt that is reaching $300 billion and, more concerningly, is forecast in the forward estimates to reach close to $400 billion. The Labor Party have racked up over $190 billion worth of deficits since they were elected. The reason this is germane is because it goes to the very sustainability of Australia's health system. Private health insurance is important and support for private health insurance is important because the more people there are with private health cover, the more Australians that utilise the services of private medical practitioners and auxiliaries, the less demand is placed on the public health system.

We already have a problem in my city of the Gold Coast, Australia is sixth-largest city, where ambulances are frequently forced to do what they call 'ramping'. There simply is not the ability for the current public system on the Gold Coast to cope with the demands on the public health system. So people who are critically injured will be in an ambulance approaching the hospital and, if they are not as critical as someone else, they are just left in the ambulance on the ramp at the hospital until such time as the hospital is able to cater to that particular individual. That is meant to be a modern-day health system under Labor!

Although the Campbell Newman government in basically the 12 months since they have been elected have taken major strides towards dealing with the problems that they have inherited after nearly 20 years of state Labor government in Queensland, the reality is that it is going to take some time to repair all the damage that Labor did to our public health system at a state level. We do not have capacity for Australia's sixth-largest city to deal with the current demands on our public health system.

So what is the genius of federal Labor's approach? What have the rocket scientists over on that side of the chamber come up with? I know: let's further erode incentives for people to have private health insurance, so we push more and more people on to the public health system! That is the genius of federal Labor—more people in the public system! They are already ramping ambulances at hospitals. We already cannot cope with demand on the public system. We already see instance after instance after instance of people waiting for four, five, six hours in emergency departments to be treated, and Labor say: 'We'll push more people onto the public system. That's our great plan.' It takes a particular genius and vision to suggest that this is in fact the way forward! But this is Labor's approach. We knew that it was going to be Labor's approach because in their beating heart, when it comes to their philosophical direction on private health insurance, Labor do not like private medical. They want one big public health system and we are all treated the same and everybody is one of the comrades and we all go into the public system and we are dealt with there. That is the vision that Labor has for public health in this country. That is the reason why at every possible opportunity Labor pick away at the support that was built up over years by the coalition to encourage Australians to go in to the private system.

When the coalition was first elected—this is going back obviously quite some time—the percentage of Australians with private medical cover was quite low. We saw with insurance under the previous coalition government through the various reforms that the coalition put in place—the private health insurance rebate, the Medicare levy surcharge and Lifetime Health Cover—the number of people with private health insurance increase 75 per cent, from 6.1 million Australians to over 10.7 million Australians. It was 6.1 million Australians at the start of the coalition's period in government and 10.7 million at the conclusion of the coalition's period in government. What does that mean? It means that we had over 4.6 million people shift from the public system to the private system.

I stress that those 4.6 million people still pay their taxes to fund the public system, but they, of course, reduce their utilisation of the public system. They fund it but they do not use it, because they take advantage of paying additional premiums to use the private system. That was the track record of the coalition. Over the past six years, though, as I have indicated, Labor has picked away at the support for private health insurance so that more and more of those people shift back on to the public system. So at the very time that Australia is experiencing a fiscal emergency as a consequence of this government's reckless and wasteful spending, Labor are pushing more and more people into the public system so it is going to cost taxpayers more and more money.

We know and we have seen the kinds of frankly rabid solutions that have been put forward by the Greens with respect to private health insurance, so I am not surprised that some of that has infected the Labor Party in terms of this pathological objection to providing support for private health insurance. But the reality is that there is a good public policy reason for it. Under the bills before the House today we are going to see the rules change once again. Under Lifetime Health Cover the coalition put in as part of the incentive was a two per cent loading for each year that someone did not have private health insurance once they reached the age of 30 up to a maximum of 70 per cent loading. What we said was that, in this instance, if someone then took out private medical cover, after a period of 10 years that loading would be abolished. In addition to that, we provided the rebate on the full amount of the premium, including the loading.

Now Labor is picking away at that, so that someone who may, for example, in good faith, have been at year 9 of paying their private health insurance, about to see the abolition of the loading, now, thanks to the proposed changes that Labor is going to put into effect, all of a sudden the goalposts have shifted and that person continues to be faced with the loading. The consequence, once again—entirely predictable, very straightforward—is that people will drop their private cover and shift back into the public system.

I remind all Australians that next time they go to the hospital, if it is an emergency, and they sit there waiting for four, five, six, seven hours, they can thank the Australian Labor Party for that wait. Labor's policies are making it worse because they drive more and more and more people onto the public system. In essence, what we see are the consequences of poor economic management. If Labor had not racked up more than $190 billion worth of deficits, if we did not have debt soaring towards $400 billion, then we would not be forced to have policies like these which extract every last bit of support essentially from private health insurance.

The coalition has a proud track record of providing support for Australians who want private health insurance: to reduce their premiums, to encourage people towards private health insurance, to encourage people who pay their tax for the public system to also get just a little bit of support when it comes to their private health insurance. Labor is not interested in that. Labor cannot afford to do it. And the fundamental problem now is that our ability to provide that support has been effectively completely destroyed by Labor's wasteful spending over the past six years.

See this speech in context