Jill Hall (Shortland, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

This government's budget rips $80 billion out of health and education. It is setting Australia's health system back 50 years. I have always believed that the Prime Minister looks to the past for inspiration, and we are seeing that in what he has done in this budget.

This government is waging war on the health of Australian families by attacking the universality of Medicare. It is a war that the Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, began to wage when he was minister for health. I remember the days when he stood up in this chamber and gave rolled-gold guarantees that he would not touch Medicare. I remember the days when he stood up in here with a smile on his face, smirking from ear to ear, and said, 'I am the best friend that Medicare ever had.' We know that the more he says something like that the less you can believe it, because the Prime Minister has made an art of saying one thing and doing another thing—of presenting a case that he believes one thing when in actual fact he believes something else.

In the days when the Prime Minister was health minister, bulk-billing rates in Shortland electorate went under 60 per cent. When we came to government, when Labor was in power, bulk-billing rates rose to over 82 per cent. That says to me that Labor, the opposition, is committed to ensuring that those people who need health care can get health care when they need it, because, when the doctor bulk-bills, a person does not have to make a decision about whether they buy food to put on the table or go to the doctor when they are sick.

I know the Prime Minister has always believed in a US-style system. Millions of residents in the United States have absolutely no health insurance, and they cannot afford to go to the doctor when they are sick. Earlier I heard the minister talking about credit cards. Well, this government wants to make the Medicare card useless and force Australian patients to use their credit card when they get sick. That is really bad health policy. Good health policy encourages people to be involved in preventive health care, not just to react when they get so sick that they have got absolutely no option. If you have got to pay to go to the doctor, then people will put off going.

My electorate is a very old electorate and there are a number of people there who suffer from chronic diseases. They have been able to put in place good healthcare management plans, and they are a lot healthier because of the Labor government and the health policies that we had in place. Under this government and the cuts in this budget, the incentive will be for people not to go to the doctor when they are sick, but only to go when they are in a critical condition. This co-payment will have an enormous impact on the health of this nation, and those on the other side of this parliament just do not get it.

When Tony Abbott was in power, as health minister, he committed the then health committee to inquire into the funding of health. They brought down a report, The blame game. Now we are moving back to the blame game; back to a situation where the Commonwealth is passing the costs for providing health to the states. You have people like the Liberal premier of my state, Mike Baird, saying that these impacts start on 1 July and they cannot absorb them. They will have an immediate impact and that immediate impact is really going to hurt the people of Australia.

This government stands condemned for its health policy. (Time expired)

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