Ms Catherine King (Ballarat, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Health) Share this | Hansard source

It is always a delight to follow the member for Lyons, who I think represents some of the poorest communities across Australia. He seems to be such a champion of those poor people in his community that he somehow thinks that this budget, which puts most of the investment into the top end of town over people in his electorate, is somehow a fair budget.

Let me go to one of the areas in particular where this budget has again cut funding to services. The budget on Tuesday night proved that, no matter who the leader is, Medicare will never ever be safe under a Liberal government. This is a government that has sought at every stage to attack bulk-billing, undermine universal access to health care, make patients pay more and more, and wreck the Medicare that Australians know and love. That pattern was confirmed again in Tuesday night's budget, when the Treasurer again lined up the patients of this nation for billions of dollars worth of cuts. Having already imposed a four-year freeze on Medicare payments—a $1.3 billion freeze—in a shock move to doctors and what will be a shock move to patients, the government decided to hit them again, with another $925 million freeze, by extending it for another two years. Six years is not a freeze; it is an ice age when it comes to Medicare. It is designed to drive down bulk-billing, force patients to pay more and end universal access to health care. As the Rural Doctors Association have said, it is putting the health care of rural and regional patients into Siberia. In short, it is not just a GP tax by another name but a GP tax on steroids. Tony Abbott's now discredited GP tax only wanted to make patients pay $7. If this Prime Minister gets his way, Sydney University's Family Medicine Research Centre shows that by 2020 patients will be paying twice as much—a $14 GP tax. For many practices, this is the final straw, and we are already reading about clinics abandoning bulk-billing altogether and being forced to charge $10 or $20, even for children and concession card patients.

Mr Hawke interjecting—

I hear the minister at the table say, 'I pay $60 for a co-payment.' What you don't actually understand—

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