Julie Collins (Franklin, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Regional Development and Local Government) Share this | Hansard source

The co-payment was introduced by Labor, but not on top of a budget that is implementing all of these other nasty measures and coming at a time when people can least afford it. It did not come at a time when we were cutting pensions, it did not come at a time when we were cutting $80 billion out of health and education and it did not come at a time when a family on $55,000 was going to be $6,000 a year worse off because of a budget. That is why this measure is so, so bad. It comes on top of all of these other measures that people are going to be facing in this budget and it is all for no purpose. It is because the government of today is making bad choices and bad decisions that are affecting the most vulnerable people and the lowest-income earners in this country. That is what this is about.

I am proud to be standing up and opposing this bill. I am proud that I am standing up for the vulnerable people in my community and in communities right across the country. I am proud to be a member of a party that says that this measure, on top of all of the other measures in the budget, is not okay and is unfair. It is absolutely unfair to have a Prime Minister stand up before an election and say, 'no cuts to health,' and then their first budget has very significant cuts to health in it. They are very significant cuts indeed. It is not good enough to say one thing before an election, come into this place, and in your first budget then do the very thing that you said you would not do. You wonder why Australians have lost faith in this government and you wonder why Australians are so angry out there in the electorates and you wonder why the people you are talking to are so concerned about this budget!

We have heard from the other side that it is just the Labor Party that is scaring people out in the electorates. But it is not the Labor Party that is the issue; it is the budget itself that is the issue. The budget itself is scaring people. It is scaring people with a GP tax—we have doctors reporting already that people are not turning up for their appointments because they think it is already in place. We have the Pharmacy Guild and other people coming out and saying that this measure is of concern. Indeed, the Pharmacy Guild said that the recent study on the impact of the co-payment increases concluded:

… increases in patient contributions particularly impact on concessional patients’ ability to afford medicines. This is an impact that should be of concern to policy makers.

Too right it should. It should be of concern to policymakers, but it does not appear to be because they do not seem to understand what this budget is doing to people and why people are frightened of it. They do not seem to understand and they do not seem to care.

I am very pleased to be standing in this place opposing this bill and saying that this bill—together with the other measures in the budget—is unfair and that we will be opposing it in this place and in the other place because it is not fair. This measure comes on the back, as I said, of so many other measures in the budget that will be affecting people right across the country. It comes on top of the cuts to health and education, it comes in conjunction with that GP tax and it comes in conjunction with the petrol tax increases, the pension changes and the increase in the age for the pension. They are all things that the government said prior to the election it would not do but that it is now doing. On all of those things the government said to the Australian people, 'We will not do this. There will be no cuts to health, no cuts to education and no changes to pensions.' Yet all of those things are in the pipeline and are being introduced. The increase in the cost of prescriptions in this bill is one of those budget measures that Australians did not know they were going to get, that Australians do not want and that are so unfair on the sick and the vulnerable in our community.

The PBS is supposed to be sustainable and, as I said, that is why we did a talk about a co-payment and why we did look at that in government in the past. The other thing about the PBS is that when we were in government we did the right thing and made savings with the PBS. We did it by negotiating lower prices for patients. We did it and we put the money back into the PBS to ensure that other new drugs that came onto the market became available for patients, improved healthcare outcomes and were able to be listed on the PBS. That is what responsible governments should do. It is what we did and what we were doing for the last six years we were in government. We were attempting to make huge savings on the PBS but we were putting that money back into listing new medicines on the PBS, because we were concerned about health outcomes for Australians. We were not concerned, as this government is, about simply cutting funding from the budget and putting tax increases—

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