Gary Humphries (ACT, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Allow me to contaminate some of the arguments put by the Labor members in this place with a few facts. First fact: it is not the case that this adjustment in the Medicare levy surcharge thresholds is to account for inflation since the measures were introduced in 1996. If you had made that adjustment, as you claim you were trying to do, you would have ended up with a singles level threshold of something like $70,000, depending on whether you were adjusting for increases in the price of goods or of wages. So this argument that putting it up to $100,000 for singles and $150,000 for couples is simply about adjusting pursuant to the policy of the previous government is absolute and arrant nonsense.

The second fact is about the argument that this is a tax slug which the government believes should be taken off the shoulders of working Australians. The fact is that there is tax relief and there is tax relief. Not all tax relief is a good thing. You need to consider the downstream effect of any decisions of this kind on the total picture in the area that you are affecting. Take this example. If the government had announced in its budget that it was going to decrease the burden on working families by reducing the excise on tobacco products, what would we say? Of course, there are some families who would pay less for their tobacco products, but what would the effect be on the health of Australians? It would be to cause a deterioration of the health of Australians overall—and so with this measure. We need to pose the question: is this actually in the interests of Australians’ health generally?

Let us look at the effect. We know that this will cause hundreds of thousands of Australians to surrender their private health insurance. We know that means that when those people get sick the chances are that they will move into the public health system to obtain medical treatment. We know that that will increase waiting lists. We know it will increase pressure on public hospital systems in this country, systems which are already seriously burdened by very large numbers on their waiting lists. Take dental care as a particular example. It is sometimes said that people who are younger and fitter are the ones who will give up their private health insurance under these arrangements. But people of any age need dental treatment. They need check-ups. They need fillings. They need the sorts of things that have to happen throughout our lives. What will happen to these people, these 700,000-plus Australians—as Senator Cormann points out—who have given up their private health insurance, when these people need dental care? The chances are that either they will have to bear those very severe costs themselves, and we all know that going to the dentist is no cheap affair—so much for helping working families in Australia—or they will have to join the public dental waiting queues, very long queues that are increasingly under pressure, growing all the time, which are not going to be much relieved by the decisions of this government, to be perfectly frank, and we are going to find more people under pressure because of the state of their dental health.

The fact is that this has not been thought through by the government. They have not taken this step in order to relieve the pressure on working families; they have taken this step because they have an ideological opposition to the entire concept of private health in this country. They want to get people out of private hospital lists, out of private health insurance and into public systems, for reasons which are very hard to determine indeed. If those systems were working well, if they were under less pressure than they are now, you might understand it, but the truth is simply that they are not. That ideological position will cost Australians in terms of their health very dearly in the future.

Let us be clear about this decision. It will increase the cost of private health insurance—no ifs, no buts; it will certainly do that. Medibank Private has already said it is going to lose 10 per cent of its customers. What will it do to its premiums in those circumstances? It will have to put them up—and those opposite claimed they were going to bring premiums down, not put them up. It will force more Australians out of private health insurance and it will force more people into public hospitals and onto waiting lists for public health services.

With this decision, Labor will dishonour spectacularly its election promise to put downward pressure on public hospital waiting lists. There is no other consequence which can be foreseen except that that will occur. That is an absolutely gross dishonesty towards the Australian people. It is time, as Senator Cormann said, that we have more debate about this, that we expose the reasons behind Labor’s decision and that we bring to light the true downstream effects of this decision, because they are extremely damaging to the health of Australians. (Time expired)

Question agreed to.