Joe Ludwig (Queensland, Australian Labor Party, Manager of Government Business in the Senate) Share this | Hansard source

Again he interjects to cover up his mistakes and misleading of the Senate. There is always difficulty with these types of debates. I know that sometimes the opposition may not like to hear the truth in these matters, but it does not give them the right to interject. They know interjection is disorderly and it only extends the debate unnecessarily. Of course, Senator Cormann knows the truth of those matters. He should make it plain, rather than reading great slab of words which he knows are misleading.

Earlier, Senator Williams made a contribution about rural and regional consumers, and it is worth responding to Senator Williams in kind. There are two issues—firstly, Commonwealth assistance to support regional and rural delivery of cataract services. The government supports eye services through a number of mechanisms such as the Medicare program, the Medical Specialist Outreach Assistance Program, the Visiting Optometrists Scheme, the PHI and the Macular Degeneration Foundation. These are important government initiatives in rural and regional Australia. In addition, there are Indigenous matters. For many Indigenous patients, the pathology means that cataract surgery is difficult and time consuming, and they will benefit from the new higher fee. Items will be available to any patient with similar difficulties and complexities, and $58.3 million is being allocated to improve eye and ear services in Central Australia. In his contributions to the debate today, they were the two issues that Senator Williams engaged with in a genuine sense, and I answer him in that way.

As I have indicated, the position this chamber is faced with is clear. If you support the disallowance motion then, stunts aside, you are clearly supporting a motion that will remove the item from the schedule. That is what the Senate can do. That is within the legislative ability of this chamber and that is what, if this motion is carried, it will do. That will be the position that you will have put yourselves in. The sensible course is to oppose the disallowance to ensure that the government can continue to have an MBS schedule which provides this support for patients and consumers. We can debate backwards and forwards about the merits of it, but this is the position that the minister has arrived at through, I suspect, difficult decision making. If you look at the statistics and the position that this government has arrived at, it is about ensuring that cataract procedures are remunerated appropriately under the MBS. That is the nub of the issue. To agree to anything else in this chamber would be to ensure that MBS item numbers cannot be altered, that you maintain specialists on MBS item numbers as you want. That puts Senator Cormann in the position simply of supporting specialists; there is no doubt about that.

The position that we urge the Senate to adopt is to reject this disallowance motion. The clear advice of course is that the opposition’s actions today will throw cataract procedures into disarray. That is the position that they have advocated and they will allow to occur today. The opposition should not try to hide behind or cover up their ineptitude in this area. This is the position that they are going to put patients and consumers in.