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

I rise to indicate a much greater level of uncertainty and concern about the National Health Amendment (Pharmaceutical and Other Benefits—Cost Recovery) Bill 2008 than Senator Sterle seems to feel about it. I see a piece of legislation which has not been well consulted on, the effect of which is likely to be felt in the hip pockets of Australian consumers of pharmaceuticals, and which has not been handled in a way which I would consider to be a model for the way in which legislation should be brought forward. I am referring there particularly to the way in which the government has handled the question of tabling regulations—that they should give, in this case, the Senate Standing Committee on Community Affairs confidence that what is being done is appropriate and within the government’s own guidelines for cost recovery. I will come back and explain what I mean by that in a moment.

I will start by making the observation that before the federal election last year Labor made a great deal of its capacity to attack the waste and inefficiency in the way the Howard government ran agencies and departments. It claimed that there was a great deal of wasted expenditure, that we were spending profligately and that the cost of government could be reduced substantially by cutting back on this waste and efficiency without affecting the quality of services delivered to the Australian community. What we saw in the first Rudd-Swan budget was the eschewing of the clinical, surgical removal of fat. Instead, they went for the cutting off of whole limbs—measures which were crude, direct and which simply took out operations, irrespective of their efficiency or effectiveness—and the imposition of an increased efficiency dividend which, of course, was imposed equally on inefficient and efficient areas of government.

This legislation is an example, I think, of that crude policymaking. The previous government looked at the question of cost recovery. It undertook consultation to see whether cost recovery was a good idea. It came to the view, listening to that consultation and looking at all the evidence, that it was not a good idea and that it was not going to work.