David Gillespie (Lyne, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

I would classify the speech of the member for Throsby as hypocrisy and the pot calling the kettle black. It was full of emotion, froth and bubble—it was more like a lather. I remind the House of a quote from a minister for health:

By targeting funding, prioritising spending and making tough but responsible decisions, we are ensuring that health spending is focused where it can be of greatest help to Australians most in need and at most risk.

Now, that was not us. That was the last minister for health, in the ALP's 2013 budget, in which they took $160 million out of Medicare payments in the first year, then $664 million in the forward estimates, in their last budget. They introduced a pause in indexation, as was elegantly outlined by the current Minister for Health. On one hand they come in and have an emotional speech, rather than a logical speech, criticising the pausing of indexation, but then we realise that it was initiated by the ALP.

Not only have they attacked the Medicare system and had the hide to come in here and criticise our initiatives to fix the budget deficit and debt left to us as their legacy, they have a long history of attacking health management in the country. They attacked health insurance on many occasions. They means tested the rebate on private health insurance. They may have an ideological problem with it, but the reality is that it delivers health care for so many people. If these people were not in private health insurance, the public health system in the hospital scene would be absolutely swamped. Australia has a dual system—a mix of private care and public care. Yet, they keep trying to blow up one half of it. They means tested the rebate in 2009 and 2011; they also attacked the Lifetime Health Cover rebate. They changed indexation to attack private health insurance by stealth. Look at the PBS—one of the other pillars. They politicised the PBS and stonewalled decisions and recommendations by the PBAC. Since the coalition has been in power, over 388 drugs have listed by us. With medical research, which this country is extremely good at, in 2011 they tried to sneak $400 million out of the NHMRC. People were awake to that and, fortunately, it was shelved. But then they returned in 2013 and took $140 million out by clever accounting—by delaying payments for a month or two in the hope that no-one would notice. Talk about hypocrisy.

We have listened and we have consulted. There has been a change of health minister. There are no problems with that. Things like that happen in every government. The previous government had six ministers for small business, for goodness sake. So they have no credibility at all in talking about defending the Medicare system. Because we have listened, there has been a removal of the co-payment. When situations change, governments are meant to listen to their voters. We have certainly done that. We will continue to consult and take the Australian populace and the medical profession with us in these difficult times. We have inherited one almighty mess in the financial sphere. You cannot make any good decisions as a government unless you get your books in order. So we have to do that.

We value general practice. Every patient values what their general practitioner does. That is why we have listened. It was disturbing in a major way the business model of how most general practitioners work. We recognise that. There is no sin in that. That is common sense. We are all about delivering solutions. To get to the nub of it—

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