Cory Bernardi (SA, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary Assisting the Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Hansard source

In reviewing the Fairer Private Health Insurance Incentives (Medicare Levy Surcharge) Bill 2009 [No. 2] and the Fairer Private Health Insurance Incentives (Medicare Levy Surcharge—Fringe Benefits) Bill 2009 [No. 2] put forward by the Rudd Labor government, I realise that the government are confronted with a great moral challenge. You may be excused for thinking I am referring to last year’s great moral challenge of our time—the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme, which somehow has been relegated to the backblocks of the legislative agenda for 2010. That is just another example of the failure of this government to implement any substantive policy that is actually in accordance with the best interests of the Australian people.

We could talk about the whales and how the government is going to sue people and take the Japanese to court. That has been on the backburner for a couple of years but has reappeared now in an election year. We could talk about the government’s environmental promises with a CPRS and other nonsense that it has put forward as the greatest moral challenge of our time. That has gone. We could talk about its fiscal conservatism before it blew $150 billion of taxpayers’ money on nonsense. We could talk about its failed education revolution where it has not introduced a laptop per student as it promised before the last election. Now we are into a new realm of broken promises. In this instance we are talking about the Medicare levy surcharge, another broken promise by the Rudd government, which in spin worthy of a whole troop of whirling dervishes it has called the Fairer Private Health Insurance Incentives Bill—more nonsense because there is nothing fairer about what the government is proposing here. The government is proposing to increase taxes for those people who previously wanted to take care of their own private health insurance needs but who will be forced to drop it because of the consequential action the government is proposing to take in removing the private health insurance rebate. It is more nonsense, more empty rhetoric and more spin from the most loquacious and disingenuous Prime Minister that this country has ever seen.

Let me remind you, Madam Acting Deputy President, of why I can say that this is more empty rhetoric from an empty vessel in the Prime Minister who makes a heck of a lot of noise. He has said repeatedly that the government—federal Labor—will also maintain Lifetime Health Cover and the Medicare levy surcharge. There is your get-out-of-jail-free card for the Prime Minister because the word ‘maintain’, he would maintain, could be interpreted as ‘increase’, because increase tax is what these bills will do. They will increase the taxation burden on ordinary Australians and Australian families. They will increase by 0.25 per cent and 0.5 per cent the Medicare levy surcharge for individuals and couples. They will be increased because the government is pursuing an ideological vendetta against private health insurance. It is just another vendetta that this government pursues in relation to private ownership, private industry and private enterprise, and private thrift—anything that does not place the government at the economic centre of how the country is running and that does not place the government at the centre of family life or the education system. This government is opposed to anything that does not have it at the very core of almost every event in Australia.

Australian families do not want that. Australian families want to be able to take care of themselves. They want to be able to look after their own health needs by taking some responsibility, by having affordable private health insurance. They have private health insurance so that it maintains options for them but also relieves the burden on the public health system. And it is very hard to argue against that. Something along the lines of 56 per cent of operations are now undertaken in the private hospital system. This is the very system that this government wants to undermine. It wants to undermine it by removing the private health insurance rebate, which would make private health insurance more expensive for certain individuals. I am sure any number of those individuals will drop out of private health insurance because they will no longer be able to afford it as their electricity bills go up 16 or so per cent and their gas bills rise and their mortgage costs rise as a result of the spendthrift ways in which this government is throwing cash around.

As the cost of living goes up, people have to make discretionary decisions and private health insurance, as important as it is, is not regarded as important enough by this government, which is making it unaffordable. So there is a stick for this government to beat private health insurance out of people. As people are reliant then on the public health system, as they fall into the Medicare safety net, this government wants to beat them again by increasing the Medicare levy surcharge. For a high-income earner—and a very big question is what is a high-income earner in this day and age—living in Sydney you will need substantially more money to be a high-income earner and to maintain a certain lifestyle than if you live in, say, Hobart or Adelaide. The government is going to beat you with more tax. More tax is some sort of incentive. Apparently the logic is this: ‘We are going to make you drop out of private health insurance and then we are going to tax you more for putting extra pressure on the public health system.’

It strikes me as a duplicitous, irreconcilable objective. The government wants to reduce the pressure on the public health system, yet it wants to provide disincentives for people to maintain private health insurance. The government, of course, knows the consequences of its actions. Basically, it means it will reap more money from the Australian taxpayer. It is going to rip cash out of households that, in many instances, really cannot afford it and is doing so in order to buttress its own coffers—the coffers that have been run down not into just an empty vault but into negative territory. This government has wasted so much money. It has been irresponsible with taxpayers’ money; it has been irresponsible with its ideological agenda that is seeking to pit ordinary Australians who are seeking to take care of their own needs and requirements against their own government. What a shameful thing! I know there are many on the Labor side who share my disdain and contempt for the way Mr Rudd is going about his business.