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

It is a great pleasure to follow the member for Ballarat in this debate on the Private Health Insurance (Prudential Supervision) Bill 2015. We can see the amount of interest on the government benches in their own bills! The health minister this morning did not even speak on the bill establishing a medical research fund, so it is a pretty extraordinary day for the parliament. We have had a bill where the minister did not articulate her views on medical research. And then the bill was guillotined. Yesterday they were against the guillotine. They voted against passing their own small business bill. So, you could forgive the public for being a bit untrusting of this government.

So much of what we do in our lives, particularly in societies like Australia, is based on trust. We certainly seek to trust institutions, not just governments but other institutions as well—things like private health insurance. And as the member for Ballarat was saying, the last thing you want in what is a pretty bewildering market is the idea—

Mr Tudge interjecting—

The minister across the table is talking about my wonderful tie. I bought this upon my election, actually. It is the tie I gave my maiden speech in. But back to private health: we do trust private health institutions. We pay our money and generally we do not look at the fine print. You are relying on two things. You are relying on the institution and its reputation and its ethical considerations in doing the right thing by the consumers of its product. You are also relying on the government to set up an institutional framework that actually underpins some of those ethical considerations and expectations we all have as consumers. And that is what allows us to trust institutions like private health insurance providers, or indeed any insurance provider, and that is what underpins fundamentally many of the transactions in our own community.

We know how damaging it can be to the public interest to have that trust undermined. As the shadow minister said, in cases like Storm Financial, we know that they are regulated by APRA and we know that there were certain failings there, and they have been articulated in various government reports. We do not want that same situation to occur here because the government, in a frenzy of red tape reduction, has undermined the things that protect consumer interest and in protecting consumer interest, reinforce the trust in civic institutions and commercial institutions in our society. We need to be very careful that that does not occur. That is why, when this bill goes to the other place, we will be referring it to a committee, which no doubt will look at those areas in some detail and get experts and others to give us submissions, to look at the framework to see whether this can be done without any detriment to consumers. It is one of those bills where I guess the devil will be in the detail, and we just need to be careful that in the frenzy of enthusiasm against regulation we do not undermine the very things that underwrite much of this commercial activity.

It is interesting that whenever we talk about private health—and we can see the interest on the government benches; they are packed in like sardines over there, listening to my speech on their favourite subject, private health! We normally get a few of them biting from over there.

Mr Hawke interjecting—

Mr Hawke is over there in the corner. Normally he would give us a contribution.

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