Mike Freelander (Macarthur, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak today on an issue that has been at the heart of my career since I left school in 1971. I admit my bias quite freely. I became a medical student in 1972 and saw the devastation that medical costs could cause families, sometimes resulting in bankruptcy. It was not until the start of Medibank, our first universal healthcare scheme, introduced by the Whitlam Labor government, that we saw people being able to afford proper health care in Australia. There was enormous opposition from the Liberal Party and also, I must admit, from some in my own profession. Unfortunately, Medibank was emasculated by the Fraser government and it was not until it was reintroduced in the name of Medicare by the Hawke-Keating government that things started to improve. Slowly, however, the conservative parties have undermined our universal healthcare system to the point where Medicare is more a healthcare cost subsidy scheme than a universal healthcare insurance scheme. I am getting a little ahead of myself. At least you know the context from where I come.

I came to parliament after last year's election and one of the first issues to come into the House was the legislation that enabled the selloff of the Australian bowel cancer registry to Telstra Health. This was apparently already agreed to by the government. There was very little debate or public scrutiny. I do not think there are many people in this parliament who appreciate just how important and seminal to our healthcare system this was. In the rapidly approaching the future, our health data will be the most important determinant of our health outcomes. This will include genetic information, which will determine treatments, disease risks and preventative strategies, as well as indicating which drug treatments are better for the individual.

This was a very underhanded way of undermining a system that could have easily been kept within the Medicare system. The beginnings of this health data collection has now, without proper community scrutiny, been sold off to private enterprise. This is a very bad result and it is a very bad result for our healthcare future. I do not think it is something that this government understands. In fact, I do not think health care is anything that this government understands. Once sold off, this registry will be very difficult to get back into the public system. It will also mean that future health data will be easily sold off into the private system, and this has the potential to be absolutely disastrous to our public healthcare system looking forward.

One might easily be forgiven for treating any guarantee given by this government with a huge amount of scepticism. As the American baseballer and coach Yogi Berra—

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