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

) ( ): I want to acknowledge the member for Berowra's contribution and his advocacy in this space and thank him for raising such important matters in this chamber here today. In particular I also want to ask the minister about public hospitals. Minister, you have had this secret task force developing something. We do not know whether the departmental secretary has been on a folly of his own or not. But, anyway, we will continue to pursue that. In particular I want to get the minister to outline what his public process is going to be for the next public hospitals agreement. Labor in government spent a lot of time through the Health and Hospitals Reform Commission doing the work. It is a significant part of Medicare and our healthcare system. What is your proposal to develop the beyond-2020 health care and hospital system? If it is not this Commonwealth hospitals benefit, which you claim it is not—we know that it has been pretty actively pursued—are you going to have a public process? In my view, you should.

I also want to speak about the Medicare freeze. We had the former Prime Minister introduce the freeze in December 2014. I know exactly what the minister is going to get up and say on that, but I would remind people that in fact, because we had this weird historic indexation arrangement where the Medicare Benefits Schedule was indexed in November, Labor decided to change that indexation to July. In July 2014, under this government, re-indexation of the Medicare Benefits Schedule occurred. Then in MYEFO in December 2014 this government introduced a new freeze on the Medicare Benefits Schedule. We had the initial freeze until 2018, and then we had the government decide that they were going to bank that until 2020, saving billions of dollars, all of which they tout loudly will go into the Medical Research Future Fund. They are pretty proud of that fund and think it is a good idea, but that is all the money that they have banked from this freeze—and it is their freeze.

What we did see in the budget papers—and I refer to those specifically—is that, whilst the government said that it had decided to stage the freeze, it had not decided to lift it immediately as Labor had promised to do in the election campaign. That damage still remains embedded, as does the damage that it has done to our healthcare system. Of course, the budget continues to rely on well over $2 billion worth of continued cuts to Medicare in that process. So the numbers are actually on that.

We had a whole raft of things being said by the government in relation to the freeze over a period of time. We had them saying the freeze was not much, that it was only 60c. I cannot remember which member said that, but one of them said that in the chamber. They have said that they have learnt their lesson in terms of the Medicare freeze. We have also heard them say: 'It has not really done much damage. Bulk-billing is as high as it ever was.' In fact, we have seen—and the minister likes to quote the overall figure and does not quote MBS item No. 23, which is the figure that is the most important when you are referring to bulk-billing figures—bulk-billing for GPs drop again since the election. That is the actual fact. Bulk-billing has dropped again since the election of this government. That is what has actually been happening. That is what the statistics actually show.

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