Ms Catherine King (Ballarat, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Health) Share this | Hansard source

by leave—As I was previously saying in this debate, one of the other elements of this budget that is making health care less affordable and less accessible to people is the changes to the Medicare safety net. In a somewhat tricky move the government have put forward a reasonable proposition—they are starting to say, 'Let's have some better targeting of the Medicare safety net,' and it is true that a number of people will reach that safety net earlier—but there is $270 million of savings in that measure, which means that when people hit the safety net they will get less back than they currently do. So the devil is in the detail when it comes to the safety net changes. As I said, whilst we would support better targeting, there are many, many Australians that never ever reach the safety net threshold. Indigenous Australians would never in a million years get to the sorts of costs in terms of access to services that are involved in the threshold for the safety net.

Another area that is affected is the freezing of the MBS items for two years. In essence, this is a measure that translates into more out-of-pocket costs for people trying to access specialists. So again you have to look at the detail of the budget to see where, in every element of it, the government is increasing out-of-pocket expenses for people trying to access health care.

In dental care the government is cutting $229 million by abolishing the dental Flexible Grants Program. That is a program for regional and rural communities in particular to build better dental clinics, to improve access to dental chairs and to improve access to dental training and clinical training spaces. The government has also cut $391 million by deferring the national partnership agreement for adult dental services. Again, this affects some of the most vulnerable Australians in our community. Having opposed the abolition of the Chronic Disease Dental Scheme, the government now seems to be cutting the very scheme that was designed to help low-income people access public dental care. Again, no notice was given to the states and territories about this deferral. Public dental waiting lists are already well beyond what we would expect them to be. They will blow out even further. In every community where those public dental waiting lists have started to stabilise, they will now start to blow out because of the decision this government has made to defer and cut $391 million out of that dental scheme.

The budget also contains structural changes and savings, such as those made through the abolition of the Australian Workforce and Productivity Agency. We remember that a huge amount of work was done to undo some of the damage that the Prime Minister had done as health minister when he capped GP training places, along with the lack of planning and investment that had gone into developing Australia's health workforce. We will have a bit more to say about that in a subsequent debate. But there is great concern about the $142 million which has disappeared out of workforce planning in this budget.

The General Practice Education and Training program has been abolished, and something that has been condemned by the Rural Doctors Association and rural doctors at large is the abolition of the Prevocational General Practice Placements Program. We have also seen the abolition of all of the Medicare Locals, when the Prime Minister directly said that there would be no Medicare Locals closing. Every one of them is abolished under this government's plans.

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