Mathias Cormann (WA, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Health Administration) Share this | Hansard source

I am close to wrapping up the opposition’s contribution in this debate, I assure you. Firstly, in relation to the comments made by Senator Xenophon, I place on record that over 11½ years of the Howard-Costello government we provided between $5,100 and $9,000 per annum worth of tax cuts to Australians in the $50,000 to $75,000 income bracket. John Howard and Peter Costello did that without the disastrous consequences that will result from this very bad public policy.

A very bad public policy, I repeat, was pursued by the government under the pretence of offering tax breaks when in reality it was a very thinly veiled attack on the private health sector—a policy where the government did not even seek to assess the impact on public hospitals, where the government did not even seek to assess the impact on future health insurance premium increases and where the government only sought to assess how many people would leave in order to be able to calculate how much they would save and how much it would cost them. They were not able to tell us the true and accurate estimates of the number of people they expected to leave until two or three months into the inquiry, when they finally were able to confess: ‘Yes, we expect 644,000 people to leave.’ That became 583,000. Now it is 492,000 people.

I suggest to the government that that is still an underestimate of what will happen, because of one of the fundamentally flawed assumptions this government is making—and I invite you to check it in Hansard, Senator Conroy, because I would not want you to accuse me of verballing people yet again. Essentially, Treasury and Health officials both said that they expect this to be ‘a one-off shock to the system’. ‘A one-off shock to the system’ is what Mr David Kalisch, from the Department of Health and Ageing, said in the Senate estimates process.

The reality is that it is not going to be a one-off shock to the system. This is going to push up the price of premiums, so more people will have to leave, which will push up the premiums a bit more, so more people will have to leave, and you will have a new downward spiral. That is exactly what happened in 1983, when you started off with a drop from 63 to 50 per cent. Things accelerated. Membership started to drop by two per cent per annum. Then Senator Graham Richardson said: ‘If this keeps going the way it is, it will be three to four per cent per annum in a couple of years time. If things continue the way they are, we will end up at 25 per cent private health insurance membership by the end of the decade.’

If that is what the government want, if the government are quite happy to introduce a policy that will lead us down the path of ending up with 25 per cent of Australians being privately insured, then they should say so. They should be honest enough to say so. Do not come here and pretend that this is some sort of effort to provide a tax break, because, if it were supposed to be a tax break, you would have announced it before the election and you would have made sure that it did not discriminate against people who do take out private health insurance but that it was a tax cut for people in relevant income brackets whether they take out private health insurance or not.

I also take this opportunity to make a comment about the Greens amendment on the review. The opposition will be supporting the Greens amendment on the review, but let me just make the point that this is really like having a bus drive at 150 miles an hour against a wall and saying: ‘Let’s have a review afterwards to see whether people got hurt, instead of making the decisions before we hit the wall to apply the brakes, turn the bus around or remove the wall.’ There are a whole heap of things that you can do before you end up in a situation where you know that people are going to get hurt.

This is a bus with 20 million Australians on it, and the government is driving it right against that wall at 150 miles an hour. Do you know what? Instead of making decisions on turning that bus around, applying the brakes, making some sensible changes and making a proper assessment of the risks ahead, the government is intent on keeping on driving. Even if you slow down that bus from 150 miles an hour to 120 miles an hour, as long as you continue heading for that wall, people are going to get hurt. Yes, the review will show us afterwards that people got hurt.

Once the Australian people can see where this policy is going to lead, they will change the driver. At the next election, we will be calling on the Australian people to change the driver of the bus, because the Australian people do not want you to drive that bus against that wall; they want you to apply the brakes. They want you to turn that bus around. Quite frankly, everybody knows that, if you drive a bus at 150 miles an hour against that wall, people are going to get hurt. That is why we think that the government should have done a proper assessment—the government should have done its homework—before introducing this legislation.

We will be supporting the Greens amendment on having a review, but we note that that will be a review after the fact. That will be a review after people have already been hurt. That is not the way to devise good policy. Good policy means that you make a proper assessment of the likely implications, the likely risks and the flow-on implications of a particular measure before you implement it.

That is what is fundamentally wrong with this government. This government is driven by an ideological pursuit against private health. It tries to dress it up in its spin of: ‘This is about a tax break,’ even though this will force up health insurance premiums for 10 million people, including one million Australians earning less than $50,000 who will not get a tax break—people like Mrs Judie Kearney-Wilkins, from Treasurer Wayne Swan’s electorate of Lilley. These are people that the Treasurer should very carefully listen to. I am pretty confident that Mrs Judie Kearney-Wilkins would be very concerned about where this bus driver is taking this bus. She would be very concerned about that wall over there. While we will be supporting the amendment to have a review, we think the government should have done its homework before introducing this legislation.

Question put:

That the amendments (Senator Siewert’s and Senator Xenophon’s) be agreed to.