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

Yesterday 35 members of this government decided that they would rather have the member for Dickson than the member for Wentworth as their Prime Minister. Thirty-five members of the government, including the current Minister for Health, said that they would rather have the person who presided over some of the worst health policy in the nation as Prime Minister than the member for Wentworth. It says a lot about the mob opposite that they would rather have the worst health minister on record as the Prime Minister than the current Prime Minister. So I think it is well worth this House, as a matter of public importance, looking back at the government's greatest hits when it comes to health.

The member for Dickson was the worst federal health minister in Australia in a generation. That's not just me saying that, although I do have to say I wholeheartedly agree; that was the judgement of the nation's doctors. There has been some pretty stiff competition for the crown from those opposite. There was the member for Warringah, who, when he wasn't obsessing about how to stop women accessing medical terminations, was giving rolled-gold commitments on Medicare and then promptly abandoning them. There was the scandal-plagued member for Farrer who somehow managed to start damaging fights with doctors, pharmacists, pathologists and pretty much everyone else in the health sector. Years later, the government is still trying to clean up some of those messes that she made in the portfolio, but at least she actually wanted the portfolio and cared about it. And now we've got the member for Flinders, the man who's continued the government's freeze on the Medicare rebate. He's presided over billions of dollars of cuts to hospitals and has spent the last 18 months kowtowing to the big private health insurers, putting their profits before patients, and now he's reportedly desperate to get out of the health portfolio so that he can become deputy Liberal leader. Just 18 months in the health job, and he can't wait to get out of it. He doesn't care about the health of the nation. He is just using it as a stepping stone for his political ambitions.

On the other side of the chamber, it's a rogues' gallery of incompetence and attacks on Medicare and our hospital system. And yet none of these hopeless ministers can challenge the member for Dickson for his sheer bloody-mindedness and his assault on the Australian universal healthcare system, a system that is the envy of the world. When doctors were polled a few years ago now, 47 per cent of them named and shamed the member for Dickson as the worst health minister in 35 years. We've had about 15 health ministers in that time, but half of the doctors of the nation agreed that the member for Dickson was the worst. He was only in the job for 15 months, but the damage he did in that short time as health minister was extraordinary. Let's consider his appalling record. Bear with me, as it is going to actually take a while.

The member for Dickson was one of the chief architects of the horror 2014 budget—the cruellest, nastiest budget in living memory. It was a budget so infamously unpopular it ultimately destroyed the Prime Minister and the Treasurer who delivered it. What was the member for Dickson's contribution to that budget? It was $57 billion worth of cuts to public hospitals, for starters. That's not a Labor number; that was the number offered up by the government's own Treasury at the time. The 2014 budget tore up Labor's national partnership agreement on public hospitals, a massive broken promise and a disaster for health care in this nation. A cut like that meant fewer hospital beds and longer waiting times for emergency care and for elective surgery. It meant doctors, nurses and other hospital staff simply did not have the resources they needed to deliver top-quality care. That was his vision for the nation's public hospitals—cutting them to the bone and letting patients suffer.

The Liberals, under the current Prime Minister, eventually restored some of this money because they knew their cuts were electoral poison. But even now they are persisting with the funding formula that the AMA says will doom our hospitals to failure, a deal that is billions of dollars below what was promised and billions of dollars below what a Labor Shorten government would deliver. Of course, we also saw the $7 co-payment to see the doctor. Remember that one? This was another of the member for Dickson's bright ideas, a policy that effectively undermined the universality of Medicare that somehow he thought doctors and patients would welcome. It was a policy that would have forced up the cost of seeing a GP and the costs of out-of-hospital care. He also wanted the states—remember this one?—to charge a co-payment on emergency departments as well. These co-payments weren't just targeted at the wealthy or well-off; they were for everyone, including children, pensioners and the chronically ill—the poorest, most disadvantaged people in this nation.

It was one of the most regressive policies ever proposed. It was only because Labor and the crossbench opposed it that it was killed off eventually. As usual, we ended up saving the government from their appalling instincts to slash and burn health funding. But the member for Dickson thought it was a great idea and spent months advocating for it and then, if that was even possible, made it worse by proposing an even higher co-payment. He liked it in large part because it would deter people from going to the doctor. Deterring people from going to the doctor was what the policy was designed to do. We know that people who don't go to the doctor typically get sicker and sicker and end up costing the health system more.

But, of course, the member for Dickson's health policies didn't stop there. He wanted to also force up the cost of prescription medicines. He wanted people to pay an extra $5 every time they filled a script, and that included extra charges for pensioners and other concession cardholders. He also wanted cuts to the PBS safety net and the Medicare safety net. He wanted to ensure that people with chronic and complex health problems got less support.

But, wait, there is, in fact, actually more! The member for Dickson also began the Medicare rebate freeze. He made it more expensive to visit a specialist, allied health professional, nurse, midwife or dental surgeon. Stared down by the Senate on his genius GP tax, he decided later to extend that Medicare freeze to GP visits—a GP co-payment by stealth. That Medicare freeze still exists in form today and will endure for another two years. It has robbed more than $3 billion out of Medicare. That means it has ripped more than $3 billion out of the pockets of patients. And, as a result, out-of-pocket costs are still getting worse to this day.

Earlier this month, the Australian Institute For Health and Welfare finally laid bare the full extent of the health affordability crisis in this nation. Despite the Prime Minister's promise that no-one would pay more to see a doctor under this government, the report shows Australians are now spending nearly $30 billion a year on out-of-pocket expenses and that includes $3 billion in non-hospital Medicare subsidised services. Half of all patients have incurred out-of-pocket costs to see a GP or specialist or to have blood tests, X-rays or other scans. Seventy per cent of patients seeing specialists made some out-of-pocket payments, and more than a million people spent $600 or more on medical gap fees. As a result of these soaring costs, 1.3 million Australians are either delaying or skipping seeing a doctor or getting a test when they need it, putting their wellbeing and, possibly, even their lives at risk.

Despite all of this, the government has done absolutely nothing when it comes to out-of-pocket costs. The member for Dickson also abolished Health Workforce Australia, which was tasked with ensuring that the health workforce had appropriate skills and training. He abolished the Australian National Preventive Health Agency. He took the axe to, generally, every prevention program that there was federally, cutting millions of dollars from measures put in place to prevent cancer and to tackle obesity, problem drinking and smoking. There were massive cuts to dental funding, diagnostic imaging and ophthalmology and the destruction of Labor's Medicare Locals system. There was no corner of the health system that the member for Dickson did not take an axe to. Not including the cuts to hospitals, he cut $10.4 billion from our health system in a single budget.

Let's not forget this chestnut in the 2014 budget: the market testing of the payment system for health services by commercial payment service providers. That's a fancy way of saying that, in fact, the member for Dickson wanted to sell off the Medicare payment system. It was his idea. He wanted to start the process of privatising Medicare. It's there in black and white in the budget papers. He was an absolute disaster when it came to being a health minister of this nation, yet 35 members on the government side of the House decided that he would make a better Prime Minister. It tells you everything about the Liberal Party and what they think of health and what they think of the Prime Minister that they think he would do a better job. (Time expired)

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