Clare O'Neil (Hotham, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

When Labor introduced Medicare to the Australian parliament, the Prime Minister at the time, Bob Hawke, said that without it two million people faced potential financial ruin in the event of major illness. In one real policy statement, Labor was able to take a health system that was unfair—that was not working properly—and create a new health system which all Australians would be able to benefit from. There are some very simple core principles that sit under Medicare and the health system that we have been able to create and to defend over the last 30 years.

One of those core principles is very clearly that all Australians should have access to high-quality health care. We also believe that contracting a major illness—a chronic disease—should not automatically mean that a person and their family descend into poverty. Over the last 30 years Labor has had to fight tooth and nail to protect Medicare and to protect the integrity of our healthcare system. Unfortunately it is something that I have had to do, something I have had to work very hard at over the last two years that I have been a member of parliament, because what we have seen over the last two years is more or less constant attacks on the principles that underpin this system. We saw a particularly egregious example last weekend when the health minister, Sussan Ley, announced that she would be putting into the field a private health insurance survey which asks some very clearly leading questions about how Australians feel private health insurers, in order to calculate what a person's premium should be, should be rating the risk that person presents to the insurer.

This probably sounds very technical and innocuous, but it is absolutely not. It is fundamental and is a very clear indication of this minister's constant attempts to try and Americanise our Australian health system. I want to explain to those listening what is so important about this principle. In Australia, the risk of patients to healthcare providers is calculated is calculated using something called a community rating. What that means is that under Australian law a health insurer cannot charge you more for your health insurance because you have, for example, a long family history of breast cancer. They cannot charge Australians more for health insurance because they live in a part of the country where there are much higher rates of obesity. They cannot charge elderly Australians, who are entering a period of their lives involving higher healthcare costs, more for their insurance because of those increased risks. This is fundamental to our system. We need to have an insurance based system which ensures that, whatever walk of life you come from, you get the same risk rating. This is absolutely essential to the system we have in place. That is why Labor has come out so strongly this week to say that this is unacceptable and that we do not support a change to the way that risk is calculated for Australians. What is so disappointing about this is that it is part of a broader pattern that we have seen over two years of this government—first the Abbott and now the Turnbull government—trying to undermine the planks of our healthcare system.

People often do not believe politicians when they talk about our relentless efforts to undermine systems, so I actually want to articulate some of the cuts and attacks that we have had to defend. More than $60 billion has been cut from our hospitals in the forward budget and $370 million has been cut from preventive health care. Hundreds of millions of dollars have been cut from dental health care. We have seen millions stripped from mental health budgets and from Indigenous health care. And let us not forget the GP tax—again an attempt to impose more costs onto the people of Australia who are consuming health care. Alongside the GP tax, of course, we also saw attempts to change the cost of medicines under the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme. In almost all cases Labor has opposed these changes. We will always be defenders of the great healthcare system we have in Australia.

I say that we will continue to defend the system not just because it is fair, and not just because it fits so perfectly within our values as Labor people, but because this is a system that really works. In fact, most Australians probably do not know that we have one of the best healthcare systems in the world. We know that, because we get fantastic health outcomes, with low infant mortality rates and really long life expectancy compared to other countries, and our healthcare costs in this country are kept quite low when we look at other countries who are achieving great results. I see our health budget as an investment in the welfare of the people that we represent. Nothing could be more fundamental to us as members of parliament in protecting that. I will continue to stand with Labor to do that over the course of my life as a member of parliament.