Nick Champion (Wakefield, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

It is a great pleasure to speak on the Private Health Insurance Amendment Bill (No. 2) 2014. This bill seeks to do a number of things, but mainly it seeks to transfer the function of the Private Health Insurance Ombudsman to the office of the Commonwealth Ombudsman and to align those two offices as part of the government's commitment—I guess, as the previous speaker would say—to reduce red tape and regulatory oversight.

There are some concerning changes in this bill and ones that the government will have to endeavour to explain to the public. At the present, the subject of a complaint may request additional time to report to the PHI Ombudsman. It would seem to me that that is not an onerous thing. In fact it is of benefit to the subject of the complaint, which would no doubt be a private health insurance fund. This ability to ask for extra time is not transferred in this bill—ostensibly to provide consistency with the Commonwealth Ombudsman's existing powers.

There is currently a provision for the minister to intervene where the PHI Ombudsman decides not to investigate a complaint. This bill has no equivalent provision for the minister to intervene where the Commonwealth Ombudsman decides not to investigate a complaint. Similarly, there is currently a provision for the minister to request the PHI Ombudsman to undertake investigations, but this bill has no equivalent provision for the minister to make such a request of the Commonwealth Ombudsman. There are a number of other issues—for example, the penalty for failing to participate in mediation is being reduced from 30 penalty units to 10 penalty units and there are some limits on the information powers of the ombudsman.

This is one of those bills that will give those opposite the opportunity to decry regulation and they will suggest that there will be some great effect on fees from this relatively minor reform. But the complexity of the modern world is always with us and it is not just government that is responsible for that. The member for Hindmarsh, in an earlier debate, pointed out that much of the red tape that people find frustrating is the result of private sector endeavours. This is one of those areas. We are dealing with private insurers and their regulation.

The shadow minister, the member for Ballarat, pointed out that the ombudsman has been busy, handling 3,427 complaints in 2013-14, or around 65 complaints per week. That is up 16 per cent on the previous year. The ombudsman has not been sitting idle but has, rather, been quite busy. That activity is of course of benefit to consumers. It is consumers who approach the ombudsman with issues relating to private health. One person's regulatory burden is another person's consumer protection. I think the government, and indeed the parliament, needs to be careful when looking at these things. We need to make sure that the necessary protections for consumers are there.

This government's record on health is not great—$50 billion worth of cuts to public health in this country, to public hospitals, to state health budgets. We know that hospital budgets are under increasing pressure—from the march of time, the march of demographics, the march of medical technology and from healthcare inflation. Healthcare costs are rising much more steeply than is ordinary inflation. There is massive pressure on state health budgets, so $50 billion worth of cuts to states is a serious problem. In Deputy Speaker Hawke's own state, Premier Baird has called on the federal government to look again at those cuts. Premiers of all persuasions are grappling with how to deal with those cuts. It is a very serious issue.

This government also shut down some 61 Medicare Locals, even those that were working very well. I know that in South Australia my own Medicare Local and the Medicare Locals in country areas were working very well. You can make always make some sort of argument about the efficiency of such a program across the nation, but I think that members of both parties would agree that the ones in my state were working pretty well. With Medicare Locals the government has thrown the baby out with the bathwater—shutting down 61 of them at enormous cost to the taxpayer, only to reinvent the wheel with primary healthcare networks. People will scratch their heads if they look closely at that. They will wonder what great gain to public health was achieved out of that whole episode.

This government has even considered the privatisation of Australian Hearing. I certainly hope the member for Boothby is weighing in on behalf of an institution that has been around since 1947. It was formed as a result of a decision of the Chifley government to protect war veterans and the victims of a rubella outbreak, but it has become a very important institution. It had the support of the Menzies government and has had the support of all governments since then. It was even expanded quite a bit under Prime Minister Howard. It is an important national institution that both parties should be proud of. It should not be subjected to the vagaries of the private sector. We know that its current service provision—in particular the good research of the National Acoustic Laboratories—would not be replicated under a private model. It is an important public institution that has put Australia at the forefront worldwide of advanced manufacturing in hearing technology. We should be proud of that—and we should certainly not be putting it at risk.

Then of course we have seen the GP tax. I think we are up to mark 4 now. The latest cuts to rebates equate to an $8 GP tax. That is what the effect of them would be—forcing every GP clinic across the nation to be a tax collector. The original $7 GP co-payment was a tax not just on every doctor's visit but on every scan and every blood test. We know that the senior figures in this government who have been trying to put this in place for a very long time will not give up. They will return to it. That first iteration of the GP tax gives you some idea of where, given the slightest opportunity, they will try to go. Mark 2 and mark 3, which occurred around Christmas, I think—it is hard to remember—not only had cuts to rebates but also insane time lines for GP surgeries. I know the member for Boothby was visited by many GPs. I think we are on to our second health minister now, and I know he has been lobbying away very carefully. He knows just the sort of chaos that was inserted into these very hardworking small businesses, particularly around Christmas time. You would not have wanted to be a practice manager around Christmas time. You would not have had much time with your family, because you would have been too busy trying to completely overhaul billing operations in your small practice and trying to work out how you were going to restructure your business. So we know why the government has had to raise the white flag of retreat on these things.

We know they have got a very spotty record on health. In their Our planReal solutions for all Australians there were not many mentions about health and certainly no mention of any of the matters that I have talked about. It was all pretty flossy stuff, but they did say a few things about private health insurance. They have on occasion said that they would bring it back when fiscal circumstances allowed, and the Treasurer, the member for North Sydney, was making promises that they would be in surplus in year one. That would have given people the impression that the means testing of the private health care rebates—something that has saved the budget $20 billion—was something that the government was going to pursue. But we now know that they have absolutely no intention of turning back Labor's very sensible means testing—its very sensible saving of $20 billion to the budget—because they have not included it in the Treasurer's intergenerational review.

We know that they are full of hypocrisy and chicanery on this. That is their MO. We know this from the fact that they have increased private health insurance premiums by an average of 6.18 per cent—and that is from an ABC news report on 3 March this year. What we get is this rather limp urging by the health minister for consumers to shop around, and yet here we have a measure in this bill to help them deal with complaints with private health insurers and they are shifting that into the Commonwealth Ombudsman's portfolio of responsibility. Even though the Private Health Insurance Ombudsman is a very busy ombudsman, they are shifting that to the Commonwealth Ombudsman, who is busy with a range of other matters.

So there are some concerns here. While the government talks a terrific game on private health insurance—saying that they are all for supporting it and that it suits their ideological dispositions towards health—we know that from Fraser onwards they have been constantly trying to reinsert the profit motive and dismantle universality in this regard because it is just part of their DNA. It is just part of the thing that they want to do. We have to be cognisant of this hypocrisy. We have to be as cognisant of their hypocrisy on private health insurance as we should be cognisant of their hostility to universal health insurance.

We know their agenda in government. It is a chaotic moving feast of hypocrisy on the one hand—this commitment to the marketplace on one hand—and, on the other hand, this deep ingrained hostility and commitment to things like co-payments and market signals. You can go back to Fightback and the Fraser years and you can go back to Prime Minister Howard. He wanted to tear Medicare apart. That is what he promised to do. They have this ingrained tendency when in public office, in government, when they are on the treasury bench, to absolutely make a mess out of health and not build on it, as the public would want them to do. Rather, they show chicanery, hypocrisy and hostility toward universal health care, to Medicare—one of the finest healthcare systems in the world; a mixed model of private and public insurance providers; a universal insurer. It is a very important system which has given Australia not only good coverage but also a healthcare system that keeps costs down.

I implore the government and those who are party to it to remember the political consequences of their actions in this place, particularly with regard to health care, and I would urge them to pursue a more moderate course, if only in their own interest but especially in Australia's interest.

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