Julian McGauran (Victoria, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

Dear, oh dear! Was that the government’s effort to defend the Tax Laws Amendment (Medicare Levy Surcharge Thresholds) Bill (No. 2) 2008 for the umpteenth time? It was very sad. You did not put much into that, Senator Brown, to be quite frank. I know the government put you up to it—to being the lone speaker in the dying days of this bill. You must know defeat is before you. There was no passion in that. You said that we were resisting on ideological grounds. I am pleased to be able to follow the contribution on this bill made by my Western Australian colleague, Senator Cormann. He is someone who has spent a lot of time on this issue—from the beginning through to now, its closing point.

Senator Cormann was party to the Senate inquiry and had much to do with the writing of the dissenting report—a very comprehensive report and one that was not full of cliches like the contribution by the previous speaker. I wrote a couple of the remarks down. They were so esoteric. Her argument for the government’s position was that the difference between private health insurance and public health is ‘out of whack’. That was it—‘out of whack’. So we are just supposed to take that on face value—‘out of whack’! We do not know how out of whack or what is particularly out of whack. In contrast, the previous speaker from the opposition side, Senator Cormann, backed his statements up with facts, figures, modelling and experience. Read the dissenting report, for heaven’s sake! That is the difference. We take this issue of health seriously. We know it is a No. 1 political issue for any political party. Heaven knows, the last time we were in opposition, health was a problem for the then Liberal opposition, and we had to come to grips with the issue of health and Medicare.

Senator Cormann laid down the principles for a good, healthy health system. We have probably one of the best in the world. I would defy anyone in any country to compare their health system to Australia’s. I think Australia has the best health system in the world. It is yet another legacy left by the previous government for the current government, and in the first nine months they are already starting to dismantle it. The principles laid down by the previous speaker on the opposition side are not esoteric. They are real; they are concrete.

We turned those principles into policy and action when in government. We had an affordable system, an accessible system, a modern system with the best of care. We had a health system that had a balance. To abide by those principles you need a health system that has a balance between private and public. That is what our side believe in. If you want to accuse us of ideology, our ideology is that the best system for the Australian public is a mixed system, with a balance between public health and private health, because it offers freedom of choice for the individual and for the family.

Senator Conroy, if you want to talk about ideology, we know the other side’s ideology on this. Because we have the facts and figures to prove that our ideology produced the best health system, you have to ask yourself: why would the new government take to the system as it stands now? Because of ideology. I will refer again to Senator Cormann’s speech—and I will refer to it even more when I address myself to the dissenting report, so comprehensive is it that it ought to be read into Hansard. There is enough material there to make a good speech about and mount a good case for why this bill ought to be defeated.

But I was talking on the point of Labor Party ideology. We saw it when they were last in government and we are seeing it now that they are in government again. In fact, we saw it when they were in opposition. Let us go through the history, which Senator Cormann rightly raised. He mentioned Senator Richardson. Talk about a blast from the past. Ironically, in the chair at the time we had Senator Hutchins, one of the modern day New South Wales number crunchers. He is pretty good at it, but no-one is like Senator Richardson.