Ian Macdonald (Queensland, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Northern and Remote Australia) Share this | Hansard source

In the five minutes I had before question time interrupted this debate, I was expressing some amazement that the great moral challenge of the century, the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme Bill 2010, had not been put first on the program today and that we were instead dealing with the Fairer Private Health Insurance Incentives (Medicare Levy Surcharge) Bill 2009 [No. 2], a bill that highlighted a broken promise by Mr Rudd. I quoted from Mr Rudd’s now quite famous letter of 20 November where he gave a rock-solid written guarantee that he would retain the existing private health rebates which this bill is all about knocking off, in direct contravention of Mr Rudd’s rock-solid written guarantee.

I then made the comment that Mr Rudd and his party have been very poor managers of the whole health debate. We know that Mr Rudd said the buck stops with him and promised that, by a date just recently passed, he would have all the hospitals in Australia fixed and that otherwise he would take them over. Of course, it was just another example of Mr Rudd’s good spin before an election that people believed, and, as we have come to expect with Mr Rudd, it did not work.

I also mentioned how Labor’s knocking off $180 million in the last budget from the pathology support through Medicare had impacted upon me personally as someone who has had open-heart surgery and has a plastic valve in his heart to keep him alive. Some might hope that, with these pathology cuts, perhaps I will not be here! To keep myself alive I have to keep my blood thin; to keep my blood thin I have to be permanently on warfarin; and to make sure that it is kept at the same level I am supposed every three or four weeks to go and get a pathology test. I have been doing that now for 13 years. It only takes a second to get out the blood and make sure that it is somewhere between 2.5 and 3.5, and that will keep me alive by keeping the blood flowing through my heart. It is essential that it be done—that is, it is essential from my point of view because I want to stay alive.

Yet I went along to my pathologist the other day and they said, ‘I hate to tell you this, Ian, but this is going to cost you $40.’ I said, ‘It can’t cost me $40; I’ve been doing it for 13 years and it hasn’t cost me a cent.’ They said, ‘Mr Rudd’s knocked so much off this that the pathologists are now not subsidised in the way they used to be, so they are recovering their costs from their patients.’ I tell that story because I am one of those—although we are relatively poorly paid as politicians—who can still afford that. But there are many Australians who simply could not afford the $40. I am not talking about pensioners and people on welfare benefits; I am talking about ordinary Australians in employment. If they have to pay $40 a month just to check to keep themselves alive, it becomes very unfair on those who simply do not have the money to pay for it.

That is the sort of thing that Mr Rudd does. He wants to save $180 million, but he is spending $43 billion. We just wasted $20 million on Senator Conroy’s request for tender in the National Broadband Network. It did not achieve a thing. It was just wasted. Was it $20 million? I think it might even have been more than that.