Tony Zappia (Makin, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Manufacturing) Share this | Hansard source

Can I say to the minister: your party has been in government now for over two years and it is time you took responsibility for the position of this government's financial mess.

I want to begin my contribution with a quotation:

He who has health, has hope; and he who has hope, has everything.

The quotation encapsulates how good health is at the heart of our very being. Indeed, I can think of no other area of public policy that matters more to people than good health policy, because when a person has poor health little else matters to them or to their family. That is why this government's attacks on Australia's health system and aged-care services—the funding cuts that we have seen imposed and the attempts to Americanise our health system—are not only bad public policies but will ultimately be rejected by the Australian people.

They will not be treated as fools, as they have already shown. They can do their own sums and they will not be seduced by the Prime Minister's continual rhetoric about fairness. I say, with respect, that all we hear is the Prime Minister coming into this place day in and day out, talking about how he wants everything to be so fair. The truth of the matter is that there is nothing more unfair than imposing additional costs on people who cannot afford the health care they need.

It is not a matter of what the Prime Minister actually says; it is more a case of what he does, and that is what we should be looking at. When you look at what he does, he was part of the government that came in two years ago, and more, and brought in a whole raft of changes with respect to the health system of Australia.

I want to turn to the American system, just for a moment, because that is clearly where this government is heading with respect to our system in Australia. It is a system where those who can afford health care are looked after and those who cannot afford it miss out. We know that when you miss out that you cannot afford the health costs, because if it is a serious health issue those health costs can run into tens of thousands of dollars. In the US, they spend about 18 per cent of their GDP on health costs across the country. Most of it comes from the pockets of individuals. Yet life expectancy in the US is much lower than it is in many other developed countries, including here in Australia, where we spend around nine per cent of GDP on health yet we have a much longer life expectancy, as do most other advanced countries, who spend about the same proportion of their GDP. The point I make about that is that the American system does not work and does not give you the health outcomes that are required, and indeed the flip side is true: Australia is not expending such an exorbitant amount on health costs that we need to make the drastic cuts that this government wants to push through.

We now know that on top of the health system that this government wants to dismantle—and we have seen cuts of $60 billion from the public hospital system, $370 million from preventative health programs, $2 billion with respect to the MBS freeze on GPs, and other cuts to mental health, Indigenous health and dental programs and so on—the government is looking at introducing a 15 per cent GST across the board. The government will not deny or admit any of that, because it keeps talking about the fact that we have to have a conversation about it, but the fact that it is not denying it means that it is part of its plan and something that it wants to consider. If a 15 per cent GST is introduced, just as it affects the lower income families of Australia in every other sector, it will particularly hit the lower income families of Australia when it comes to health.

Amongst those that are in the lower income bracket of Australia are older Australians, and we have just heard the member for Blair talking about that and highlighting just how this will hit older Australians very hard. I have spoken to older Australians in my own electorate.

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