Matt Thistlethwaite (Kingsford Smith, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Foreign Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

Forget all the bluster and rubbish from the member for Bowman. I am going to give you the voice of the Australian people when it comes to their beliefs on Medicare and what this government has done. This is an email that I received in January this year from a constituent, Terry of Matraville. He writes: 'I had to go to Medicare for a simple expenses claim. When I entered, I expected a separate desk for each organisation. I asked someone where Medicare was, and she said, "Line up." The queue had about 20 people in it, so I decided to go home and try on the phone—without success, as the system was overloaded and would not take any more calls. I went home as I have bad knees and I cannot stand for any length of time.'

This email perfectly highlights this government's approach to Medicare. Terry had to go home and could not access Medicare services at the local Centrelink office, because two years earlier the Abbott government closed our local Medicare office in Eastgardens. They closed the office and merged the service with Centrelink. They said, 'Don't worry, there will be separate services when you come to Centrelink.' There are no separate services; people have to queue for one service. That is the result. Making life harder for people is what this government does.

They are doing this because, let's be frank, the Liberals and Nationals do not believe in Medicare. They never have and they never will. They see it as an intervention in a market. They see it as contrary to their conservative philosophy. They do not support Medicare. They want to water down Medicare and reduce its coverage. In the case of doing that, the Australian people are suffering.

Let's look at what they have attempted to do with Medicare since they came to government. In 2014, in their first budget, they tried to introduce a Medicare co-payment so that people would have to pay to visit their local GP. Never mind the fact that the actual effect of the Medicare co-payment is to increase overall health expenditure, because you are actually discouraging people from going to visit the doctor when they are sick—particularly people on low and middle incomes, and pensioners, who cannot afford the co-payment, so they do not go to the doctor and they get sicker and sicker. By the time that they have to go to hospital, it becomes acute care, which is much more expensive.

That is the approach that the Liberals took to Medicare in their first budget, but they could not get the co-payment through the parliament. What did they do in the wake of that? They continued the GP rebate freeze. They continued to freeze the rebate that goes to GPs when it comes to Medicare. In effect, they were introducing a co-payment through a sneaky, backdoor method, forcing GPs to charge a co-payment and to water down the universality of Medicare.

Now we have learned that the government plan to allow private health insurers into GP practices. Again, they are trying to end the universality of Medicare. They are continuing with this campaign to dilute Medicare. Just before Christmas we had the government introducing $650 million worth of cuts to bulk-billed pathology and diagnostic services. So patients, including cancer patients, will now pay up-front for MRIs, CAT scans and X-rays. Remember what I said at the beginning: they are making life harder for Australians and watering down and undermining Medicare. That is this government's approach to universal health coverage.

Their latest attack is quite despicable because they have determined that they are going to attack children by cutting the children's dental health scheme. The purpose of this scheme is quite simple. It is to provide dental health care for kids who have decay and holes in their teeth, whose teeth need fixing and whose parents cannot afford a trip to the dentist. The government scheme subsidises those children. It is a means-tested payment. So it is targeted to those families that cannot afford dental health care. A million children in this country have accessed the scheme, and what is this government's approach? They are going to cut it. What did the minister say when she was questioned about this? She said, 'There may be a better way to target funding.' That is code. That is Liberalspeak for, 'We do not believe in universal health care. We do not believe in Medicare. It is an intervention in the market and it is against our conservative values.'

The government have also cut $57 billion from the hospital budget. We are seeing the effects of that in my community, with cuts to the Prince of Wales Hospital. The government do not believe in Medicare. They have cut and watered down Medicare, and Australians will suffer.

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