Jim Chalmers (Rankin, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary to the Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Hansard source

with that big tantrum, as the member for Oxley rightly points out. No-one would be surprised that they want to continue with this ridiculous tantrum, which wouldn't be fitting for the under 11s at Rochedale Rovers losing a grand final, let alone for the Prime Minister of a great nation like ours. So it is disappointing but not entirely surprising to hear that they will continue to pursue this pretty ridiculous campaign, which flies in the face of the considered work of the committee and which isn't consistent with the attitude of the minister, who has been, as I said, accommodating. A bit of free advice for the Prime Minister: it's not really a good look to run around the country for 14 months whingeing and whining about an election result. He kept the country waiting long enough on election night. To drag it out more than a year after the election is a pretty disturbing and disappointing outcome.

The core underlying issue is not even the electoral laws. It is ideological. It is that this government can't be trusted with Medicare. They haven't believed in it since day one, since the days of Howard and before, and they look for any opportunity to strangle it. When that was called out during the election campaign, the Australian people reacted as they should, and they said, 'Take your hands off Medicare.' We shouldn't pretend it was some kind of aspect of the campaign that led Australians to believe that. It is a core belief of the Australian people that we should have the best health system in the world, we should have Medicare, we should have universal health care and your access to health care should be determined by your Medicare card and not your credit card. So the Australian people reacted as we expected they would. That wasn't an electoral issue. It wasn't about the regime around the electoral rules; it was about a fundamental belief.

We maintain that fundamental belief in Medicare. It is disappointing that those opposite do not. They are even dragging out the unfreezing of the rebates, which just shows again that they didn't learn the lesson of that election last year, 14 months ago. The Prime Minister did infamously call the police in when he nearly lost that election. They told him there was absolutely no case to answer, so he has tried to change the rules. He should spend less time reprosecuting last year's election and more time rectifying his cuts to Medicare. It's all part of the circus on that side of the House, unfortunately—this whole fracas about Medicare and the election and the electoral rules. We are always in the cart for a proper conversation about good electoral rules which keep pace with the times, but we won't indulge the Prime Minister's dummy spit.

The opposition, through the shadow special minister of state, my colleague Senator Farrell, will continue to work with the government to ensure our laws function as intended and that legitimate political communication is not hindered or interfered with. We won't, as I said before, indulge that dummy spit from the Prime Minister, but we will support the bills when they're amended, after some discussion, some consultation, some negotiation and a lot of good work from people on all sides of this House.

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