Jan McLucas (Queensland, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Aged Care, Disabilities and Carers) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to also oppose the exemption of the cut-off on the two bills identified by Senator Carr, the Environment and Heritage Legislation Amendment Bill (No. 1) 2006 and the Medibank Private Sale Bill 2006. I particularly want to speak to the ludicrous suggestion that it is important and necessary to exempt from the cut-off the Medibank Private Sale Bill which the government has proposed.

I want to take us to the purpose of having the cut-off principle. We had in this place, long before I came here, a situation where bills were being introduced late in a session. That caused a problem for the process of dealing with matters in a seemly way. For many years the Senate had attempted to introduce measures that would enable an appropriate and orderly dealing with matters. That is why, in 1994, the then Leader of the Opposition, Senator Hill, suggested that we introduce what we are now debating, the principle of the cut-off—and that is that legislation has to be introduced in the first two-thirds of a session in order to be dealt with in that session.

Labor accepts that there are times when the exemption has to be applied, but I can find no reason why that exemption should be applied to the Medibank Private Sale Bill. We know that the Medibank Private Sale Bill was introduced into the House of Representatives on 18 October this year. On 19 October the bill was referred by the Senate to a committee to report today. We have not had the report of that committee. We do not know what the Senate committee of inquiry says, but here we are making a decision about dealing with this bill expeditiously. Even before we know what the committee says in its report we are going to agree, if all of the people who sit on that side of the chamber dutifully follow their riding instructions, to exempt the Medibank Private Sale Bill from the cut-off.

The inquiry was advertised on 25 October—one advertisement; that is all. Then we had one day of hearing into a bill that will privatise the largest provider of private health insurance in this country—a one-day hearing, in one city. We did not go into any state, just to the ACT, and we are going to make a decision on the basis of one quick inquiry. I put on the record our thanks to those community organisations and health representatives who could make that extremely short deadline. I also put on the record the fact that there are many organisations who wanted to contribute to that debate and simply did not have the time to do so. We have come to expect that in this place now. That is the normal way that we operate: we just rush things through. I think the community understands that the Senate and its processes are continually being abused by this government.

But the thing that annoys me most is the way the Department of Finance and Administration has treated our Senate inquiry. We are talking about the sale of an entity that will bring between $1 billion and $2 billion in revenue to this government if the bill is passed, yet the Department of Finance and Administration and the Department of Health and Ageing did not bother putting in submissions. I suggest that they probably thought they should, and I say here that I am sure it was on the direction of their respective ministers that they did not do so. We had the committee hearing on 3 November and a number of questions were asked that could not be answered. That is normal process, and department officials took those questions on notice. As I said, the report of the committee is to be tabled today. This morning we received from the Department of Finance and Administration a number of answers to those questions, but not all of them. I do not think that by the time the report is tabled this afternoon we will have received answers from the Department of Finance and Administration. That is the way this government treats scrutiny; it says, ‘Just roll this one right through.’ Between $1 billion and $2 billion is the expected revenue from the sale of Medibank Private, but we do not even want to wait for the Department of Finance and Administration to provide some answers. I suggest they are not going to at all.

We know that there are still significant legal questions remaining about Medibank Private: who in fact is the entity that owns it, and will compensation arise? We do not know the answers to those questions. It would have been prudent, in our view, to at least wait until there was some clarity over whether or not you can sell this thing; but, no, we are just going to push right on through with exempting the bill from the cut-off in order to avoid scrutiny. It is kind, I think, to say that this government is dealing with this sale bill with unseemly haste, but I think the truth of it is that this abuse of our Senate processes is for purely political purposes. This is no way to conduct business, much less a democracy. I have to concur with the explanation that is in Odgers’ Australian Senate Practice on why legislation was coming in late in a session. Odgers says:

... a view frequently expressed was that ministers or departments deliberately delayed the introduction of legislation until late in a period of sittings in the hope that it would be passed without proper scrutiny.

I concur with that. That is why we established the cut-off principle, and that is why it is good policy. That is why it is good practice to operate the Senate in a respectful way and it is important to ensure that scrutiny remains.

As I said, sometimes it is appropriate to exempt certain bills from the cut-off: if the bill is urgent for some reason or if it has been introduced late in a session in order to deal with issues that could not have been predicted. But I suggest to the Senate that the Medibank Private Sale Bill does not meet either of those criteria. It is not an urgent bill, and I have to say that the reasons proffered by the government to suggest that it is urgent are simply a joke. I will read them into the Hansard because I think it is important that people understand this. The statement of ‘Reasons for Urgency’ says:

On 12 September 2006, the Government announced its intention to sell Medibank Private Limited through a share market float in 2008.

It is going to sell it in 2008. It goes on:

The legislation is essential to the sale of the Commonwealth’s share in Medibank Private Limited, and the sale timetable is dependent upon the legislation being enacted.

Yes, the sale timetable is dependent on it being enacted—in 2008. There is a fair bit of time from now till then to get this process in train. I have to say, this is hilarious. Is anyone in the sector going to read this and actually think that that was the true reason for exemption? The government is an absolute joke. To say that you have to start the timetable now to sell something in 2008 is hilarious. How did we deal with Telstra? Did we take two years to work out how the process for the sale of Telstra was going to occur? Did we need two years or 18 months for that? I do not think so. It is just absolute arrogance to suggest that that is a reason for dealing with this legislation now.

Has there been anything that has come up in the last while that we could not predict that requires this bill to be dealt with after the cut-off? No, there has not—absolutely nothing. The simple reason this government want this legislation dealt with now is political. They know that the community does not support the sale of Medibank Private and they also know that 2007 is an election year: ‘So let’s try and get this issue off the plate, get it dealt with in the lead-up to Christmas, hope that the community forgets and then we can get on with having an election, clear of the reality that the community does not support the sale of Medibank Private.’

The community do not support it for a whole range of reasons. There are three million members of Medibank Private. Their membership of Medibank Private Ltd is actually in question. We do not know whether compensation will be able to be raised by class action of those members. We simply do not know. We do know, though—and the AMA, along with a whole range of other health economists, supports us—that premiums will rise. We know that. That indicates pretty clearly why government want to put off the sale of Medibank Private Ltd till after the 2007 election. They do not want to deal with premiums rising in an election year: ‘Let’s get the debate on before Christmas so that we can have a clear run toward the election next year.’ We also know that there is real potential that a float of Medibank Private Ltd will impact on the private health insurance sector right across the country. All private health insurance providers could well be affected by the sale of Medibank Private Ltd, but the government does not want the community to have further scrutiny of that.

There is no legitimate reason for this legislation to be exempted from the cut-off. There is only a political reason. That political abuse of this Senate has now been going on since the government got the numbers in this place. It has been getting to the point where we sort of expect it now—we know that it is going to happen. But, on behalf of the three million members of Medibank Private Ltd, who are annoyed that the government is pushing this through, I suggest to the government that it should delete this legislation from the cut-off in order to deal with it appropriately and with respect for the operations of this Senate.