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

I want to speak briefly to the amendments. These are of course government amendments to its own legislation. We're seeing this government as a bit of a shambles in that it's now having to once again introduce amendments to its own legislation because it hasn't been able to get this legislation up through the parliament in the time frame that it said it would.

I understand there are a couple of issues that the government has also decided to now include in this Private Health Insurance Legislation Amendment Bill 2018, relating in particular to the Private Health Insurance Ombudsman having to provide 48 hours notice to insurers, where the ombudsman will exercise his new entry powers, and to only delegate his functions to persons with appropriate expertise. Whilst the latter we certainly agree with, I do want to flag that we'll have a look at how the operation of the Private Health Insurance Ombudsman's provision of 48 hours notice to insurers operates in practice. We'll support this amendment, but I do want to have a look at how over time that operates in practice. What the legislation was trying to do was to ensure that the Private Health Insurance Ombudsman had greater powers to investigate complaints that have been arising in the private health insurance field. We understand, through the Senate committee process and the scrutiny of bills, it is believed that, due to fair process, the 48 hours is necessary. But I want to flag that that's certainly one of the areas that, in practice, we want to have a look at.

Again, here we have a government that has been so distracted by itself, so distracted by the plotting within the party, that it wasn't able to get its own legislation correct in the first place. So it's had to come back into this place and has had to move amendments to its own bill—not accepting amendments that others may have moved. If we had had a Minister for Health who was concentrating on his day job, rather than the plotting that this minister was engaged in, we might have been able to have a bill that didn't require the government to amendment it. As I said at the outset, Labor will support these amendments, but that the government is once again having to come forward with amendments to its own legislation certainly shows how distracted and in complete disarray this government is.

Question agreed to.

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