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

This is the last sitting week before the budget—there are only two days of sittings before the budget is brought down. Again, this is a very big test for this latest health minister—will he lift the freeze on the Medicare Benefits Schedule? Will he finally acknowledge that the freeze on the Medicare Benefits Schedule that he and his predecessors introduced, sitting around the cabinet table, is hurting patients across the country?

Mr Hunt interjecting—

The minister says Labor introduced this freeze. The minister does not know the facts. The freeze we are talking about here in this parliament today is a six-year freeze—it is an ice age. The freeze that Labor introduced for eight months to bring Medicare into line with the financial year was lifted in July 2014. This is entirely of your own making, and you have to own this decision—a six-year freeze on the Medicare Benefits Schedule is an ice age when it comes to the fee that is paid in order to make sure that patients can access a GP. Will the minister finally, in this budget, admit that this government got it wrong? Will he back the decisions of every single one of our healthcare workers across the country who say this government has got it wrong when it comes to health and lift the freeze? It is not just Labor. We have been fighting ever since the 2014 budget to make sure that we get money restored back into general practice, back into primary care. The morale of general practitioners and doctors is at an all-time low because of this government's attacks on them, and we have been fighting hard to get this freeze lifted.

Will the government now act, and back the Australian Medical Association, the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners, the Australian Nurses and Midwives Federation, the Consumers Health Forum, the Australian Healthcare and Hospitals Association and the Rural Doctors' Association? They are all telling the government to lift the freeze. In fact I do not think there is a single stakeholder in the health sector that is not telling the government that they got it wrong on health and it is time to lift the freeze.

As I have said, this is a challenge all of the company's own making. It is worth reflecting on where this came from and how we got to this place. First we had the infamous Commission of Audit, which was one of the clearest signs for Australians that the Liberals were not the government that they promised they would be. Interestingly, I see that the Prime Minister has brought Tony Shepherd back into the fold to provide advice—well done, Prime Minister! It was the Commission of Audit that recommended the end of universal Medicare as we know it. Then we had the first health minister, the member for Dickson, and the 2014 budget. In the 2014 budget they introduced a $7 co-payment, in their signature style, to slug every single patient in the country for the health care that they need. It was always clear from the start that this was going to be bad for patients, bad for doctors and bad for the health system.

When they finally dropped that measure—they were forced to drop that measure—they still could not help themselves. They tried to introduce a $20 co-payment GP tax at the end of 2014. That measure did not last very long. It lasted as long as that health minister lasted, frankly—about another three months—and they had to drop that plan again. But then they decided that they would introduce a new freeze onto the Medicare Benefits Schedule because the freeze, of course, had come off in July 2014. Here we were now back in January 2015, and they decided to introduce a new freeze onto the Medicare Benefits Schedule, starting off for a four-year period. Then, of course, in a shock decision in the next budget, they then extended it for a further six years. We then saw the unedifying example of the then health minister—we had another by then; our second in a row—saying during the election campaign, 'Treasury and Finance would not let me get rid of it.' That is what it was—blaming Treasury and Finance. The last time I looked she was actually the minister responsible for the decision.

This six-year freeze has been an absolute ice age when it comes to patients across the country. We have seen out-of-pocket costs higher than they have ever been before. We have already seen GPs across the country increase fees and drop bulkbilling. I know the minister likes to say, 'Here is the increase in trajectory of Medicare spending,' and I think he uses the figures $22 billing, going up to $26 billion.

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