Rob Mitchell (McEwen, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise today to try to get some answers out of this government. Why have our communities in McEwen so clearly missed out in the Turnbull government's latest budget? McEwen is one of the fastest-growing regions in the nation, yet the government has failed to commit a single cent to this developing region. They have ignored our health needs, they have ignored our family needs and they have ignored the housing crisis that is happening all around us. This is about as bad a budget as we have seen in the northern suburbs. The Liberal government has not delivered on roads, education, health or mobile phone blackspots. In fact, last week we learnt that Minister Nash had duped the Australian public with the round 3 of blackspots by converting it into pork-barrelling for coalition electorates.

They are very good at doing a few things, like cutting much-needed money from family tax benefit part A, ripping apart school funding, half-heartedly addressing their Medicare catastrophe and desperately trying to save one job, the Prime Minister's. They are also, as we see, very good at giving tax cuts to millionaires. As I have said before, and I am not going to stop repeating it until it gets through to those opposite: there is nothing fair about making middle- and working-class families pay more while multinationals and millionaires get a tax cut.

While some may say that this budget was 'Labor light', from where we sit it is nothing like a Labor budget. We do not put millionaires over pensions. We do not put multinationals over families. We actually look after people. We put people first. When we look past the shadow puppets, we are left wondering: where is the funding for the suburbs of the outer north and the towns north of Melbourne?

As we know, the Liberals just will not stop attacking Medicare until they finally sink it. They are forcing Australians to pay more for visits to the GP, prescription medication, medical tests and scans, dental services and cancer treatments. What kind of government targets the wellbeing and health of ordinary people just to get a few dollars in the back pocket? Families throughout the electorate are left struggling to make ends meet with the government's Medicare disaster. The continued rebate freeze that the Abbott government put in place means that, while families are paying more and more for basic services, they are receiving less in return. At the beginning of the year I took the time to write to the minister for health and aged care to express my concern over the cuts and the policies that are making health care more expensive and less accessible for all of us. It is obvious that the minister did not listen, when we see the proposals for this budget leaving my constituents and all Australians wondering why our basic health services are now looking more and more like luxuries.

Local families are crying out for affordable access to health care. Only last night, a constituent of mine posted on the local Facebook page: 'We need a bulk-billing centre in Mernda. This is a joke.' If it were not so serious, it would be a joke. The Liberal government fails to fully reverse the Medicare rebate freeze until 2020, which means that not only will our medical services be underfunded but the additional payments will now fall onto the patients. It is flat-out wrong. I cannot stand by and watch the government jeopardise the health of generations to come. For the average family in Mernda, it costs $65 for a standard consultation, with an out-of-pocket expense of $27.95. When you are struggling to pay the mortgage or buy the books for kids for school, 30 bucks will make you think twice about going to the doctor. The standard consultation jumps to $75 on the weekend, so you had better hope your kids do not get crook on the weekend.

Not fully lifting their Medicare rebate freeze means that services such as mental health plans and chronic disease assessments will stay frozen for the next three years. They are just a few of the services that the Liberal government refuse to reverse their freezes on. Australians accessed these services over 23 million times in the last financial year—23 million times—and the government think the answer is to just sit on their hands. Shouldn't the government be encouraging people to access these services, not just cutting $2.2 billion from Medicare?

This government has zero credibility when it comes to the health budget. In my electorate, we have countless testimonies to the failure of the government's health budget. I was approached by a bulk-billing doctor in Seymour who raised concerns about the outdated and inefficient processing system for Medicare bulk-billing vouchers. Since November 2016, his practice has not had its bulk-billing vouchers processed, forcing him to redraw on his home loan to avoid financial trouble. The excuse that Medicare has given my constituent is, 'Oh, it's staff cuts.' Are we supposed to believe that staff cuts are a reasonable excuse for owing a doctor over $20,000?

Whittlesea Family Medical Centre, in my home town, has been forced to start charging co-payments to keep up with the rising costs. The practice manager was devastated, telling me that they try to provide a service for patients who cannot afford to go to the doctor, but now they will have fewer patients and there will be a greater strain on our local hospitals.

Internationally, policies like these have led to short-term boosts to the budget line but no long-term savings, because of the much larger strain on the public hospital system, which is more expensive to run. The continued Abbott government Medicare freeze means that doctors like these will continue to pay more for their practices, their staff, their medical products and their utilities, while the amount paid for their time, for their services, remains the same. Not only is this government not helping Australians access affordable health care; it is actually not helping providers to stay afloat.

That is why we need Labor, because Labor will always protect Medicare. Under a Labor government this freeze would have been removed in January this year, a policy that was welcomed with open arms by the AMA. But instead the Turnbull government has chosen to stand idly by and watch our health system follow the same grim path as that of the United States.

I turn to schools. Not only can this government not guarantee health services for all Australians; its budget also tells Australians, 'If you want a good education, you've got to get yourself rich parents.' The Liberals are taking $22 billion from our classrooms over the next decade. They are hoping that maybe ruining our education system means that we will not be up to pick up on their bad maths. So I thought I would simplify it down to a level even Liberals can understand. Let's say you had 10 Cayman dollars. I found these Cayman Island dollars in the hallway. Some bloke probably dropped them. So you have them and then the government comes in and takes them all away. That is what happened in 2014 under the then prime ministership of Tony Abbott. Then they put two back—

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