Chris Bowen (McMahon, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

Let us be very clear. There is one side of this House that supports Medicare, and that is this side of the House. This is an excuse. This bill, the Medicare Guarantee Bill 2017, is an alibi, an attempt to make up for the fact that the government do not support Medicare. This bill is a lame attempt to try to get the government some vague credibility when it comes to Medicare. If this government really supported Medicare, they would not need this bill. If this government really supported Medicare they would not have tried to attack Medicare ceaselessly for the last four years. And now we see this government, having realised the political implications of Medicare and how important it is to the Australian people, vainly trying to find a way to show that they actually do not mind Medicare after all and coming up with this accounting trick. All this bill is is an accounting trick on behalf of the government.

The reason that Labor supports Medicare is that we of course created Medicare, and we created Medicare because we believe that your Medicare card, not your credit card, should determine the health care you get in Australia. That is what we believe. We believe that access to universal Medicare is one of the most important community standards created in Australia over the last four decades—and we created it. That side of the House opposed it in 1984, just as they opposed its predecessor in the early 1970s, and since then they have tried to destroy Medicare by stealth. At least John Howard had the honesty to say that he would destroy Medicare. Liberals since then have attempted to destroy Medicare but have not been honest about it. And we have seen that continue under this government, the Abbott-Turnbull government.

The Prime Minister, in his more lucid and honest moments, has admitted—even when he is ranting about text messages and scare campaigns—that the government had a poor track record on Medicare. This of course became a very big and important problem during the election campaign. So the government have attempted to step away from their previous position, with the dumping of old measures. They are slowly unfreezing the MBS. It should be unfrozen immediately and it should be unfrozen with immediate effect, but the government are just crab-walking towards an unfreezing of the MBS. That is an attack on Medicare and no number of stunts or accounting tricks will change that fact. And now they are introducing this Medicare guarantee. We are not going to give the government the pleasure of us voting against this, because it is a bill with, in effect, no impact at all. So we are not going to oppose it; we are going to point out the hypocrisy of the government.

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