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

It is always a great honour to follow the Chief Opposition Whip, the member for Fowler. It is good to be with the member for Hasluck—he recently had a promotion, and that is a good thing for the country. He made a bit of history. We all hope that his wise counsel is heard in the health department and in the health ministry, because the truth is that the Abbott-Turnbull government's record on health has not been very good at all. From day one, from their first budget, we have seen an assault on Medicare—$60 billion of cuts to public hospitals, to doctors and nurses; $2 billion worth of cuts in preventative health and health flexible funds, things like drug and alcohol counselling. This is at the same time as the government runs an ad campaign on ice addiction, the problem with that ad campaign being that there is no hotline number, there is nowhere to ring, there is nothing to do. It simply makes people aware that there is this terrible problem in our communities. They are doing this pea and thimble trick because while they are running this ad they are cutting drug and alcohol counselling. We know what they did with the GP tax, which was of course a cascading tax—$7 every time you went to the doctor, $7 every time you got a scan or a blood test. It was a cascading tax: seven times seven times seven times seven. We know that they have cut money in Health Workforce, in preventative health care. This year alone we have 3,000 nurses graduating but they cannot get graduate positions in this country. It is a terrible waste of human potential—and a terrible waste of Commonwealth taxpayers' money in educating them in the first place.

Ms Scott interjecting—

I have got the bite from across the chamber. I knew that eventually one of them would own up and try to defend this government's miserable record of destroying Medicare, hammering Medicare, ripping apart Medicare. The Health Insurance Amendment (Safety Net) Bill is just another instalment. What does it tell us? It tells us that this government has not changed one bit on health. There is a new salesman, and he describes to us everything about health—here are all these options, here are the benefits of one and the detriments of another. That is what we get every question time—Lord Muck, the Prime Minister, at the box telling us all the positives and negatives of every argument but never owning up to what the government is actually doing. If you look at what the government is actually doing in this bill, it is a game of three card monte. It is like all these kinds of games you might play in politics—but the person that they are trying to game is the citizen, the health care consumer. Here we have a health care safety net bill that cuts the safety net by $270 million. Who is that going to affect? As the member for Fowler told us, it is going to affect people on low incomes—poor people, not just in Labor electorates but in electorates all over the country and especially in rural and regional Australia where we know health care is not only very important but also harder to access because of the tyranny of distance in this country.

What we have here is a so-called simplified safety net. Whenever you hear the word 'simplified' or 'deregulation' and a few of those words, you know who is going to suffer—it is the patient, the person who is supposed to be protected by the safety net and by Medicare. There are a lot of those people in my electorate—people in outer metropolitan South Australia and people in country South Australia. The Rudd and Gillard governments responded to this challenge by having a reform program—we sought agreement with the states and we put in place case-mix arrangements with activity-based funding arrangements for public hospitals, but one of the most important things we did was look at the rates of cancer and the treatment for cancer, and we acknowledged there was a problem. In my electorate, if you wanted treatment, if you needed to get into a chemotherapy bed, you had to drive all the way into the city, whether you were in Elizabeth or in Riverton or in Kapunda, my home town—I am giving the member for Hasluck a bit of a geography lesson about South Australia—

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