Tony Zappia (Makin, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Medicare) Share this | Hansard source

I've just listened listen to the Minister for Health and I'm not surprised at all, after listening to his rebuttal of our MPI today, why people in my community—and, I suspect, across Australia—are simply not convinced by his rhetoric.

When I ask people what matters most to them come election time, inevitably, the first two issues that come front and centre of mind are health and education. On both matters, this government, the Turnbull government, has proven to be shifty time and time again, and voters can see through it. We saw that trickery again last Friday when the government tried to lock in seven years of hospital funding cuts to the states by pretending to offer them a few more dollars on top of the $50 billion that was cut in 2013 to make out that it's doing something. The smart premiers could see straight through it. I'm pleased that the Premier of South Australia is not prepared to accept less money for people in South Australia than was otherwise coming to South Australia had this government honoured the agreement and funding deal that we all expected.

The hospital funding cuts come at a time when hospitals across Australia are struggling to meet the service levels that are imposed upon them—service levels which come onto hospitals and, in particular, the outpatient service because people simply cannot afford to go to their GPs. In turn, because people can't afford to go to their GPs because the costs have increased as a result of this government's policies, they turn up at the outpatient's department and therefore there are waiting lists and queues there for people to get treatment.

I want to talk briefly about private health insurance, because the minister made a strong rebuttal of our claim that he has mismanaged that area of public health policy. Private health insurance has gone up 27 per cent during the time of this government, at a time when the CPI cost of living has been less than 10 per cent. It's almost three times more. The truth of the matter is that the private health insurance industry has been making good profits—$1.8 billion last year, with some of the companies making around 20 per cent on their money. As the member for Ballarat has quite rightly pointed out, when you look at the service that has been provided under those policies, 40 per cent of the policies today have exclusions compared to fewer than nine per cent only 10 years ago. So, consumers are not getting value for money because of this government's very policies.

I want to quote one example of a constituent who wrote to me in the last two weeks. She is a person who has been on a disability pension for 24 years and attends a private dialysis clinic every week. She does that in order to save the public health costs. She is a private health insurance patient on a pension writing to me because the pension increase is in no way keeping up with the increase in the cost of her private health insurance and she is now struggling. This is a person who doesn't have a lot of choice in life.

It goes a lot further than that. Today we acknowledge the 10th anniversary of the national apology. I say that because Indigenous life expectancy across Australia is some 10 years or more less than for most Australians. We know that people in the country, whether or not they're Indigenous, generally suffer from worse health than people in the cities. Given that some 500,000 Indigenous people live in the country, the situation is much more dire. The new president of the Rural Doctors Association of Australia said: 'The Medicare freeze has done some real damage to rural doctors'—this was said by the RDAA president only a couple of hours ago in this place. It highlights how out of touch this government is with respect to the hurt and pain it is inflicting on communities and the profession itself.

The reality is that out-of-pocket costs have gone up, and that in turn has pushed people into the public hospitals or caused people to simply not go to their doctor for themselves or their children when they should. That in turn means that, ultimately, the costs of the illness are going to increase because the illness will only get worse.

This is a government that not only is out of touch because it's got its priorities wrong—giving money to big business when health and education are being pushed to one side—but truly doesn't get that health care in this country is more expensive and less accessible because of its policies.

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