Doug Cameron (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Professor Deeble has nailed your arguments. It will not threaten the viability of the health insurance system. It will not threaten it at all. All of your Chicken Little ‘sky is falling in’ arguments mean nothing when the experts come before you and destroy the arguments that you put in the committee and that you have put here. Professor Deeble went on to say:

Ultimately, public hospital admissions may rise by about 2% and expenditures may increase by a slightly lower figure. However because the Commonwealth now pays significant amounts for medical services and drugs for private patients outside the private health insurance system, and gives at least a 30% rebate on premiums, the net cost to governments will hardly rise at all.

Again, Professor Deeble shoots down the hysterical arguments that we have heard in this debate from those sitting opposite. Professor Deeble is the acknowledged expert on these issues. So what do the coalition and the industry do to try and support this unfair tax on ordinary Australians? They wheel in their guns for hire, their economists, who come in and run these crazy econometric models that just do not provide any real semblance of what can happen and what will happen in relation to the health system.

Professor Deeble again destroyed this myth that the models that were being used to try and justify this rip-off of the public funding system by some in the private health system should be continued. He argued clearly that you cannot develop a model that will model what people will do. He argued that some people will stay in a private health fund because they want to, others will stay because there is a benefit for them and others will make a choice that they will leave. He said that you cannot model what these people will do. It is quite clear that, when the modelling was put forward in the Senate Standing Committee on Economics, it was a very feeble argument that was put up to justify these models.

I think we have to be very careful about what this is about. It is about reducing the unnecessary tax burden on hundreds of thousands of Australians. It is about making sure that we have got public and private health systems that complement each other. I think it is about time those opposite stopped arguing that everything is perfect in the health system in this country. There is no doubt that the Labor government will continue to look at both the public and private health systems and assess what is required to make our system unchallengeably the best health system in the world.

It is not the best health system when chief executives are ripping $1.2 million out of the health system for their private gain. I do not believe that is what should be happening. I believe that we will need to address in the future the proper balance between the public and private health systems and we will need to take up some of the arguments that were put forward in the evidence that came before the economics committee. We must demand accountability. We must demand openness. We must demand a proper approach from the private health industry in this country so that, when they are being subsidised by 30 per cent by the public of this country, we get openness and we get accountability.

I believe that what the government is doing is the best approach to deal with fairness and equity in the public and private health systems in this country. We have had the opposition argue that there was no consultation. I have got to say I do not remember being consulted about Work Choices. I do not remember being consulted about what the opposition were about to do to rip away the basic fairness for workers in this country in the industrial relations system—absolutely no consultation there.

What we have to do is to make sure that our health system does become a beacon of fairness, equity and reasonableness for the rest of the world. We are facing tough economic circumstances because of the failures of the Liberal Party in government.