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

I listened to you in silence, Senator Cormann; you should offer me the same courtesy. What you cannot do, Senator Cormann, is provide a cogent argument as to why you are pulling this stunt. It is a stunt and you know it. There are ways to deal with these matters in debate, but you cannot help yourself. What you found out, first of all, was that to attempt to disallow the regulation was silly. Now you are trying to fix that as well. The opposition are simply making policy on the run. It is unwise, can I suggest to you, to make policy on the run in this way. What you need to do is sit down and deal with this in a sensible way rather than continue to make short-term decisions using this chamber in this way. It is inappropriate. It should not be supported. I urge senators not to support this silly stunt that is being performed by Senator Cormann.

Of course, the nub of the issue goes to Senator Cormann’s inability to grasp the need for reform in this area. What underpins this is that Senator Cormann must be in the pocket of specialists who are ophthalmologists. There is no other explanation than that to drive the position that he is putting. The opposition’s actions are not about putting patients first. This is about putting the interests of a group of specialists—a group who earn over half a million dollars a year from Medicare alone—first. That is what the actions of the opposition are about in this respect, and it is a sad day to see it. Ophthalmologists will simply continue to charge their high fees for the procedures while the opposition’s actions will prevent the government from paying any rebate to the patient. That is what the opposition faced. They then decided to use the Senate for the purpose of trying to retrospectively fix their problem, before it was even there. So they are not even in order, quite frankly. It is a stunt.

The opposition have come into this chamber and simply tried to hijack the Senate to ensure that they can underpin their false argument. It is an extraordinary abuse of this Senate’s procedures. It is an extraordinary abuse for the opposition to use the Senate in this way, yet they try to put a rational argument that they are acting in good faith. Well, it is not acting in good faith for them to make policy on the run, to come in here and to use Senate procedure for a stunt to try to underpin their own argument and to try to bolster their own position—let alone to come in here and abuse the Senate processes. That is the difficulty that the opposition face. There is no merit in the argument that is being put by Senator Cormann. In fact, the opposition may wish to respond to the CEO of the Consumers Health Forum of Australia, who was today quoted as saying:

I would like to know why the Opposition is seeking to support medical specialists who are seeking to retain high incomes at the expense of consumers.

The government want to pay an appropriate rebate for this procedure and hope that the opposition will reconsider their position and support these changes. That is the position they should be adopting. They should be in a position to negotiate in good faith with the minister and to come up with an outcome—rather than to come into this Senate, abuse the processes of the Senate and pull stunts such as this without any notice. It is a very shoddy way of acting, and quite frankly it quite surprises me that the Manager of Opposition Business in the Senate has allowed it to go on.