Sharon Claydon (Newcastle, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Labor established the Australian National Preventive Health Agency in 2010 to take a national leadership role in preventive health in Australia. The agency's goal is simple and is listed clearly on the top corner of their website. They exist to promote a healthy Australia. Unfortunately, the home page of their website now carries another message under the title of 'Budget Outcome for the Preventive Health Agency'. The message details that the Abbott Liberal government plans to (a) close the agency and (b) terminate the National Partnership Agreement on Preventive Health. This government's message is clear. They have given up on coordinated preventive health. They do not understand the benefits of preventive health today or the benefits it provides for the future.

Since the Preventive Health Agency was created, it has provided leadership across the non-government, health promotion and primary care sectors to deliver coordinated and effective preventive health activities and policies. They play a central role in collaborating across the health sector, embedding preventive health as central to the delivery of health care. Labor understands and recognises the value and need for long-term, sustained investment in preventive health. We appreciate the benefits of investment for improved health outcomes and acknowledge the savings to the health system that this investment can achieve. This is why we established a dedicated agency to drive the agenda over a sustained long- term period and provide the infrastructure for this to continue beyond the budget cycle. We built the agency so that prevention became a central focus for the health system.

The agency's programs direct actions specifically at obesity, tobacco and alcohol use—three core issues where preventive measures can have a profound impact on our health and on our overall health spend. Unlike those opposite, Labor understands the importance of investing in preventive health and primary health care—it makes sense. Indeed, it makes sense to everyone but this government. The government's ignorance was on show again today in the Daily Telegraph, when the Minister for Health attempted to discredit the Australian National Preventive Health Agency and undermine the value of preventive health by attacking targeted funding programs. The minister was especially critical of a program that the agency funded at Summernats, an event that attracts over 100,000 people, principally 25- to 40-year-old men—a notoriously difficult demographic to reach and engage with, but a core target audience for the National Tobacco Campaign. It makes perfect sense to direct a health message at an event where this demographic will be gathered in large numbers, and that is why the agency funded the promotion of an innovative quit smoking app at Summernats.

The campaign clearly had an effect, with 55,000 downloads of the app in January, when Summernats was held, compared with 19,000 in the month before—a threefold increase in just one month. The QuitBuddy app that was promoted at the event helps people to get and stay smoke free—a key preventive health measure. It helps to get the quit smoking message across when smokers need support most—like at the end of a long, stressful day, or perhaps after preparing a budget that has misled millions of people and is full of broken promises. It is clear that more needs to be done to cut through with the quit message, even to the well-educated. Innovative programs like the QuitBuddy app are making a difference. Targeting the message in a coordinated fashion, as the Preventive Health Agency has been doing, is the best way to do this. Labor will oppose the Australian National Preventive Health Agency (Abolition) Bill 2014—the abolition of the Preventive Health Agency. The abolition is short-sighted and demonstrates the lack of vision this government has in understanding the challenges facing the health system both now and into the future.

Labor is opposed to the government's callous decision to cut vital preventive health funding to the states and territories for their work in increasing physical activity, improving nutrition and healthy eating and supporting smoking cessation and reduction of harmful alcohol consumption in communities around Australia. In fact, rather than cut preventive health programs and funding, I urge the government to look to communities like Newcastle, which have successfully implemented strategies that are helping to curb binge drinking and are addressing the nutrition and healthy living habits of our youth, ably guided by the research work of Professor Clare Collins and her team from the University of Newcastle.

It is not just preventive health that this government does not understand; it is the whole health portfolio. What is becoming increasingly clear is that this government—led by their health minister and with a former health minister now as Prime Minister—is on the wrong path when it comes to health policy. They clearly do not understand what is best for the health of the Australian people. We will be paying for their mistakes for generations to come. Professor of Public Health Policy at Curtin University, Mike Daube, puts it simply:

This is a distressing budget for anyone concerned for the community's health.

The Prime Minister promised before the election that there would be no cuts to health. He has broken that promise. In this, their very first budget, the government has taken a scalpel to health spending, slicing out more than $50 billion from public hospitals, including more than $156 million from hospitals in my local area. The New South Wales Liberal government has confirmed these cuts will start hitting hospitals this year—next month, in fact; not in future years, as the federal government is suggesting. After the budget, the New South Wales Liberal Premier, Mike Baird, said:

We cannot absorb these cuts ...

…   …   …

The impact starts on the 1st of July. The equivalent here in New South Wales is over 300 hospital beds in funding disappears.

These cuts will clearly have an impact on preventive health.

It is also worth noting at this point just some of the other budget measures this government has introduced that we know will also have an impact on preventive health. The $391 million of funding for the National Partnership Agreement for adult public dental services has been deferred and $229 million has been cut from the Dental Flexible Grants Program. Funding has been cut from the Charles Sturt University dental and oral health clinics. The Diagnostic Imaging Quality Program has been stopped. The National Partnership Agreement on Improving Public Hospital Services has been ended.    Funding to the World Health Organization has been reduced. GP Education and Training Limited and Health Workforce Australia have been abolished. Funding has also been axed for nursing and allied health scholarships in Tasmania. The list goes on and on.

The rollout of the Partners in Recovery Program, which has been very successful in my electorate, has also been delayed by this government. Nearly $54 million of funding to set up 13 Partners in Recovery centres around Australia has been pushed back for another two years. As the program is already operating in Newcastle we have been spared; however, others around the country with severe mental illness and complex support needs are left without the much-needed support it offers. Unfortunately, those who need help cannot just 'defer' their illness like the government is deferring the program funding. What a shameful legacy this government is leaving for those living with mental illness, their families and loved ones.

Also, with this budget the Abbott government has gone back to its roots and launched the greatest attack on Medicare and universal health care that our nation has seen. Liberals have always opposed Medicare—it is in their DNA. This Liberal government is no exception, having already commenced their ideological disintegration of our greatest preventive health measure, Medicare. This year we celebrated Medicare's 30th birthday, but if the Liberal Party had not got their way the first time around we would have been celebrating its 40th anniversary. Instead, it took 10 years to get Medicare through the Australian parliament. Despite the wait, few could argue Medicare has not been a benefit to the health of all Australians. We live better, healthier lives because of Medicare. Dismantling Medicare does not make sense. This government is pulling apart the most efficient aspect of our primary healthcare delivery.

A broken promise from the Prime Minister, that there will be no new taxes, is at the core of Medicare's destruction. The introduction of a new $7 GP tax and an increase in the cost of medicines are indeed new taxes that are another hit to preventive health in Australia. This broken promise of no new taxes will cost a typical family up to $270 per year. The GP tax alone will cost Australian families $3.5 billion in on-out-pocket expenses. This is a tax that hits everyone: pensioners, parents, unemployed, low-income earners, people with a disability, even veterans. In my electorate of Newcastle the $7 GP tax will add more than $5 million to the healthcare bills of Novocastrians every year. This is a policy that will hit the 13,000 families in my electorate hard, especially the low- and middle-income families.

The GP tax is flawed policy, and the experts agree. The AMA, the College of Emergency Physicians, the Doctors Reform Society, the Public Health Association,    the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners, the Consumer Health Forum, the Australian Healthcare and Hospitals Association and countless health academics and economists have all advised against this tax, but the government is doing it anyway. What arrogance! The AMA has been especially critical of the tax. They have said that targeting GP services for health savings is a false economy that will lead to much greater health costs down the track. When the discussions on a co-payment were gathering momentum in January, Dr Steve Hambleton, president of the AMA at the time, said general practice was the most efficient part of Australia's health system. His greatest concern, however, were the barriers that the GP tax would put in the way of people seeking relatively inexpensive GP treatment for health complaints that might develop into much more expensive and serious problems if not treated early. In an interview with ABC Radio, Dr Hambleton said:

The main problems we've got with our health system are the growing amounts of chronic disease and our ability to treat lots of diseases that we couldn't treat that well in the past.

Our concern is that both people who need to go [to the doctor] and who don't need to go, will not go—

because of the co-payment. We do not want people to second-guess the need to see their GP because of cost.

In February when I raised the issue of the government's plan to introduce a GP tax in this place I was heckled by those opposite. They admonished me as a scaremonger, yelling and interjecting as I highlighted the impact of this attack on Medicare and universal health care and what the GP tax would mean for the people of Newcastle. But as it turns out, as we have seen in this budget and in the Commission of Audit report, there was a plan all along to introduce a GP tax. The backbench may not have been told about this plan, but it was there and the media knew about it too. I did, however, make a mistake when I first spoke about this issue in the House. I suggested a $6 GP tax would hit families hard. Well, a new $7 tax will hit even harder. And the $15 proposed by the Commission of Audit, the Liberal Party's blueprint for the future, will be diabolical.

If the Prime Minister gets his way and the GP tax is introduced, Australia will be left with a two-tiered, American-style health system in which only the richest have good access to quality health care—a system where your wealth determines your health. Labor believes all Australians should get the health care they need, not just the health care they can afford. The Abbott Liberal government are a government with the wrong priorities. Their short-sighted approach to preventive health is a clear example of their misguided direction.

The Australian National Preventive Health Agency does great work. It provides a national capacity to drive preventive health programs and policy. We need a coordinated approach, not a scattergun random approach. Abolishing the agency is not good policy, nor are the Abbott Liberal Government's attacks across the health portfolio. Labor will oppose this bill. Labor will always be the party of health care. This bill, this budget and the actions of this health minister show that the government simply do not get it. They ignore the experts, they ignore the evidence and they ignore the needs of Australian families and pensioners who deserve a world-class health system.

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