Andrew Southcott (Boothby, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I think it was Paul Keating who used to talk about dogs returning to their vomit. What we have had is Keating-lite. The wannabe member for Wakefield somehow sees himself as the inheritor of that tradition. This seems to have escaped members opposite, so let me just restate it. It has been the Liberal Party's position for the last 20 years that we support Medicare, we support bulk-billing and we support community rating for private health insurance.

I noticed in the previous speaker's long discourse on the last 40 years that he completely ignored the 11½ years of the Howard government and its very strong record on health.

Mr Champion interjecting—

You mentioned the bulk-billing incentives, Member for Wakefield. We invented them. We invented the incentive for concession card holders. Who invented the concessions for children under 16? Was it Neal Blewett? No. Was it Brian Howe? No. It was the Prime Minister when he was Minister for Health and Ageing.

Also, elements in Medicare that we are strong supporters of are access to the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme, free access to public hospitals and universal access to the Medicare rebate. I do not know how many speeches I have stated this in over the last 20 years. Not only did we strongly support Medicare when we were last in government; we improved it. We greatly expanded access in the area of mental health. What did the previous government do? What did the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd government do? They started cutting back some of the rebate that we had given on mental health. We expanded the access for allied health professionals in the areas of team care arrangements and chronic disease management plans. It was also the Prime Minister when he was Minister for Health and Ageing who decided to expand Medicare to access dental services. He understood that people needed access to restorative treatment. That is one thing we did.

In question time, the Minister for Health said—and I think it needs to be restated—that we value general practice and we value primary health care. This is the important part of our health system. We have 43,000 general practitioners. It is very important that we continue to see general practice as a valued and rewarding path for medical students to go into.

A number of other similar countries to us, such as New Zealand, the UK and Canada, have looked at reorienting their system towards primary health care. I pay tribute to the previous government for initiating the National Health and Hospitals Reform Commission. It published an enormous amount of work and a primary care strategy. The reform commission was chaired by Christine Bennett. All of this work was done and then what happened was that Kevin Rudd got it completely wrong and focused on hospitals and not on primary health care. It is very important that we reorient our system towards primary health care.

When you look at how we have performed over the last 25 years, you can see we have done very well on mortality rates, cancer survival rates and so on. We compare very well with other OECD countries. We are improving our rankings on all of those things. But the challenges we will face in the future will be in the area of management of chronic diseases such as diabetes and others.

This is a question I would pose for members. We have had a good debate here about Medicare, but we need to start thinking about what we are getting for our money. We need to be asking: how we can improve the system? I think there are a number of mechanisms through which we can improve coordination and care, such as through the new Primary Health Networks. If you look at New Zealand and the UK, they use these mechanisms very much. There are the blended payments with the practice incentive payments. Again, there are a number of mechanisms through which we can see improvement. We have a good primary health care system. There is no doubt about that. We have great health system in Australia. There is no doubt about that. But there are a number of improvements we can make to face the challenge of chronic diseases and how we keep people out of hospital. (Time expired)

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