Sue Boyce (Queensland, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

It is completely disgraceful, as you say, Senator Barnett. Poor ignorant me: like most ordinary Australians I thought that a bed was something you got to lie down on, but that is not the case within the hospital system in Queensland—and we have exactly the same issue throughout Australia. So it is a beautiful report with lots of ticks, but for what? The report is not worth the glossy paper that it is printed on. The federal government, by their very own admission, have no idea about the true state of Australia’s public hospitals and they have no idea about what impact this measure will have on what is already a dying system. They have no idea about the huge or growing cost of running them, not just to meet the needs that we know about but to meet the needs that this bill will push further into the system. If they do not know how many beds there are in Australia’s hospitals, they are certainly not in a position to financially secure the running costs of the nation’s public hospitals.

I am afraid I do not have Senator Siewert’s faith that, if the public hospital system gets worse—although it is pretty hard to imagine how that might happen—the government would find ways to repair that and to allow for that. I hope that Senator Siewert is right in having faith that the government can do something about the hospital system, but I am afraid I do not share her faith.

By dramatically lifting the Medicare levy surcharge thresholds, as this legislation would, the federal government is forcing the cost of finding even more chairs and trolleys back onto the state governments. As we all know, the state governments, given their record to date, given their history, certainly cannot afford and cannot administer, and cannot hope to cope with, growth in the public hospital system. By increasing the number of patients, the Rudd government is simply blowing out the problem even more.

So this is an issue that will need to be addressed again and again. I think there is a very real chance that, down the track, a future Rudd government or—let us hope, for the sake of the Australian health system—a future coalition government will find that they have no alternative but to adjust the Medicare levy surcharge threshold to put an incentive back into the public policy mix around health and health insurance.

This bill is terrible public policy. I know the Prime Minister, Mr Rudd, is a man who takes a lot of pride in the time he spent as a senior public servant in Queensland—a man who told us that his public policy skills would be an important component of the way he would go about governing this country. You would hope that he would know that, if you have a huge decrease in private health insurance funds, the people who will suffer the most are those who really do need to rely on the public health system.

What we have here is an old ideology, an old class warfare argument, being dressed up as some sort of fiscal conservatism, some sort of responsible government. The Labor Party has always worked against those who had the foresight and the resources to provide for themselves, particularly with regard to private health. The Labor Party has always wanted to drag everyone down to the same, lower level and ensure that as many people as possible are forced into the public hospital system—a hospital system that is collapsing even without these extra people being forced into it. The Labor government cannot get past its welfare mentality and instead reward those who are able to take care of themselves, by assisting them to free up resources within the public system.

This bill needs to be opposed. It has horrendous public policy consequences and they will not be easy to fix. If a dysfunctional system is put under even more pressure, the consequences for ordinary Australians will be particularly dire. Fixing the problem of the number of people who will flee private health funds if this legislation passes will take years and years. It will take years to repair confidence in that sector. It will take years to get private health funds back to a situation where they relieve the pressure on the public system.

The Medicare levy surcharge was a very positive and important reform introduced by the former government in 1997. Future generations of Australians and future Australian governments will very much regret rolling back these reforms. Sick and elderly Australians, and families who have members with chronic disease—the people who apparently do not matter that much to Minister Roxon, to the Treasurer or to Minister Macklin, who has suggested that she will have it all fixed by 2020 for older Australians—are the ones who will end up paying the price as our public hospitals clog up more and more. This is poor policy now and it will be poor policy for generations to come.