Lisa Chesters (Bendigo, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I have to confess, when I saw it on the front page of the paper today, I thought, for a moment, it was April Fools' Day. I thought it had to be a joke. Surely, how could this government go after Medicare and how could this government trust and involve the disgraced Minister for Human Services in this process? This government is so classically liberal it is hard to determine how on earth the Australian people could get behind them at the last election. But they did. And we are now here, today, learning exactly how much this government cares about Medicare.

They have tried over and over again, in this term of parliament, to kill off Medicare. They have tried to bring in a GP co-payment and force our doctors to be tax collectors, force them to collect $7 per GP visit—$2 for their own administration and $5 to be passed on to the government. That failed. It failed because doctors and patients in the Australian community said 'no'. For the first time in many years we saw the AMA fire up and become one of the most militant and strongest unions we have in this country. They stared down their mates in the Liberal Party and said: 'We reject your GP co-payment and what you are trying to do to Medicare.' Then we saw the cuts to hospitals. There is a reason our hospitals are crying out against this government.

In my own electorate of Bendigo they cut $34 million from Bendigo Health—and $40 million from hospitals in total. That is from some of our smallest hospitals—the Kyneton hospital, the Heathcote hospital, the Castlemaine hospital—who are saying to me, 'We're actually better off not seeing patients, then we'll break even. But the moment we start seeing patients we start going broke, because this government cut the operating budget and they are not paying their fair share to our hospitals.'

It has not stopped with the previous Prime Minister; it has continued under this Prime Minister. Malcolm Turnbull has brought back the exact same cuts as the previous Prime Minister. That only confirms one thing: this is a Liberal agenda. This is a Prime Minister that is purely and simply pursuing the Liberal agenda. We have known that, since the creation of Medicare, they will do anything to outsource, cut or sell off this public institution that ensures that Australians have universal access to health care. Why are they so opposed to ordinary Australians having decent access to Medicare? Why do they want to deny people in our community access to good quality health care through our Medicare system? These are questions that Australians have asked themselves for generations. Why do Liberals not understand it is something that Australians want? We are very happy to fight an election on this issue because when health is at the top of the priority list people do not look to the Liberals for answers; they look to Labor for the answers.

Then came today's great announcement that they are going to fatten up parts of Medicare and sell it off to the market. You can forgive for a moment the shock of the CEO of Australia Post who has been angling and saying Australia Post could help the government deliver some of these services. Australia Post, as we know, is a government entity, and the CEO was keen to talk to the government about how a government entity could support other parts of government in delivering services. But this government has completely bypassed Australia Post, an Australian government entity, and it is talking about going straight to the market. They are so obsessed with selling off public assets and public services that they have gone straight to the market and today in question time could not even a rule out whether overseas companies could bid for that contract.

The last thing Australians want when they are looking for support with Medicare is their public health care records going overseas. Australians hate the outsourcing. They hate Australian jobs going overseas, particularly when it comes to their public service, and the government needs to rule that out. The government needs to be honest with the Australian people. It needs to stop going after Medicare. It needs to reinvest in Medicare. It needs to put the funding back into health care and actually stand up for the institution.

For 20 years I have been asking people to sign a Medicare petition, Save Medicare. That trend is going to continue because this government does not seem to understand. (Time expired)

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