John Williams (NSW, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

I want to follow on from my colleague Senator Fifield and talk about the promise both the Prime Minister and the current Minister for Health and Ageing made to Australians prior to the November 2007 election. Once again, we face a broken promise. Let us have a look at the promise that was made to the Australian people. The media release was titled ‘Liberal Scare Campaign on Private Health Insurance Rebates—Federal Labor to Retain Rebates’. It goes on to say:

On many occasions for many months, Federal Labor has made it crystal clear that we are committed to retaining all of the existing Private Health Insurance rebates, including the 30 per cent general rebate and the 35 and 40 per cent rebates for older Australians.

               …            …            …

The Liberals continue to try to scare people into thinking Labor will take away the rebates.

This is absolutely untrue.

That was a quote from Minister Roxon in September 2007, prior to the election. Australians are getting quite familiar with broken promises from this government. We had the promise to put downward pressure on grocery prices, and what did we see? A website called GROCERYchoice, and a waste of $10 million—a total farce. We saw the promise to put downward pressure on fuel prices. We have not seen that either, especially with world oil prices at US$70 a barrel and higher. We have seen a promise to be economic conservatives, and in this current financial year alone I think the federal government will borrow $52 billion. That is not very conservative. We have seen the big promise to fix our hospitals by mid-2009 and, if not, they will take them over and the buck will stop with the government.

All this fairer private health insurance legislation is going to do is to put more pressure on our public hospitals. How many will leave private health insurance because of this legislation? Let me quote some figures. The Australian Health Insurance Association, the industry group representing health insurers, argues that as a result of these changes significant numbers—up to one million—will abandon or downgrade their cover, and this will lead to rises in private health insurance premiums as health insurers seek to recoup higher costs. It is as simple as that. What we are doing is putting a tax on private health insurance. As John Laws often used to say on the radio when I would be out in the sheep yards drenching sheep or in the shearing shed or whatever, the more you tax something the less you have of it—a good saying. Here is a situation where the government is simply going to tax private health insurance more. Forget about the promises to the Australian people prior to the election—they are going to change the rules now. They do not care about what they said to the Australian people prior to the election, like with many issues; they are going to put in this means test and increase the tax on private health insurance.

The Australian Private Hospitals Association argues that Treasury estimates that 99.7 per cent of people will retain their private health insurance as a result of this measure cannot be trusted, due to the complexity of the proposed arrangements. They are saying those figures cannot be trusted. So, the more we tax people for private health insurance, the more that people will leave private health insurance. That will simply put more pressure on an already overloaded public health system. I was talking recently to doctors in Inverell, the magnificent country town I am fortunate enough to live in. We have got doctors running their surgeries there in the local community who are pulling their services out of the local hospital. Why? Because they are simply working too hard. They have every day in their surgery booked up seeing patients, then they get a call to accident-emergency at the hospital, then they cannot service their patients in their surgery. Then they are working late into the nights and on the weekends, so they are withdrawing their services because they are simply being burnt out.

Now we risk seeing so many leaving or downgrading their private health insurance because of this legislation, and that will simply put more pressure on our public health system, our public hospitals, and place more work on these already overloaded, overburdened doctors along with nurses, many of whom have to work double shifts when other nurses call in sick. Budgets are also getting burnt out because there are too many desks and not enough beds, with the level of bureaucracy in the health system in New South Wales. What the government is doing here will add more pressure to those hospitals. This is simple stupidity. It will achieve nothing. The only thing it will do is tell the Australian people that Prime Minister Rudd and Minister Roxon cannot keep their word—they cannot be trusted. They gave a guarantee to the Australian people and now they are going back on their word. That is a simple fact—no argument anywhere; that it is the fact of it. All the quotes are there.

As I have said, this is a tax on health. And, when this tax comes into effect, where is the money going to go? Mr Rudd has said that the money is needed for health reform. But Minister Roxon has said that the money will be used for e-health. Then she said the money would be for new medicines. Then Treasurer Swan put a spanner in the works by saying the money would be used to pay for the increase in the age pension. How confusing is it when we have the Prime Minister, the Treasurer and the health minister all giving a different view on where this money, this saving, is going to go. Then we have the exaggerated spin that the health system is going to cost the country up to $100 billion by the year 2050. It is a wonder they did not do the forward estimates out to perhaps the next century—it might have been $200 billion, and that could be used in the media as political spin. It is simply farcical to say what it is going to cost by 2050. I am sure there will be a lot of changes in budgets and all sorts of things by then, unless the government really believes it will still be in government by 2050. With broken promises like these and many others, it will be lucky to be in government come the year 2011.

In summary, the real problem here is that, when you take away the incentive for people to participate in private health insurance, more are going to drop out. The big problem we have then is that those who stay with private health insurance are going to have to pay more. There will simply be fewer people paying the bills for our private health insurance companies. They have their fixed costs all the time; those who remain with the system will have to pay more. So all you are doing is passing on the cost. The 30 per cent rebate was a fair rebate system put in by the previous government to encourage people to join private health insurance. For every dollar they saved, they actually contributed two dollars or more to the health system. That is what happens with the system as it stands now. But the government wants to change that. Now they are arguing about where the money that they intend to save is going to go. Surely the Senate has an obligation to keep people in this place honest. The Senate’s job is to make sure that the Prime Minister and Health Minister Roxon keep their word. They cannot simply lie to the Australian people before an election and change their minds after the election and go back on their word. Is it any wonder that people become cynical about politicians when you have these core promises and then great backflips when they simply change their minds?

The changes to the private health insurance rebate are the latest phase in Labor’s unrelenting war against private health insurance. Labor hates private health insurance. The coalition introduced an open-ended private health insurance rebate because for every rebated dollar a privately insured person contributes two more dollars to our health system as a whole. We all know the cost of health is huge. No matter where you go in Australia, the biggest issue that people are concerned about is health, whether it be a hospital system, our aged-care facilities or whatever else, even CAP packages for home care facilities. One thing Australians want is a good health system. But this legislation is going to give us a worse health system. It is going to put more of a burden on our hospitals, more of a workload on those people who work in those hospitals and more costs on those hospitals already pleading for money, and encourage more people to leave the private health insurance system. As I said, this was a core promise in the last election along with many other promises that the Rudd government made. Now they wish to change their minds. I, for one, will not be supporting this along with all my colleagues on this side. Why? Because a promise is being broken and that is simply wrong in itself.

If you make a promise to the Australian people, you should keep your word, not just do a backflip on it and say to the people, ‘Well, we don’t care about what we said to you before the election. We are going to now change the rules so that those who earn more will pay more.’ This is the old Labor strategy: penalise success and reward failure. I am sorry, but that does not work well in a free-enterprise system. You do not make the poor rich by making the rich poor. We need to encourage business. We need to make the most effective use of the dollars that the government has to spend. We need to honour our word. We need to encourage people to remain in private health insurance. Otherwise we will simply overload the hospital system.

My colleague Senator Fifield touched on that great moral challenge that faced us, the emissions trading scheme, and how it was so urgent that it be passed last year before Copenhagen, before the rest of the world acted, while Australia was producing 1.4 per cent of the world’s greenhouse gases—and we were going to reduce that by five per cent come the year 2020. Thank goodness the Senate did not pass it. We said at least wait until after Copenhagen. Imagine if we had passed it and locked our nation into that great enormous tax for generations while the rest of the world was doing nothing. Would we have cooled the globe? Would we have reduced the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere? Would we have lowered the sea levels? We would not have done any of that. We would have put a $115 billion tax on industries in our nation that would have been passed on to the average Joe Blow in the street. So the Senate did its job and did it well on the emissions trading scheme.

The spin was put out that we had to act now to save the world. But, as Senator Fifield said, where is it on the agenda today? Where was it three weeks ago, when we had the first week of sitting? It was not back here. It was being stalled and talked about for a few days in the other place. Now it is not here for us to look at. Instead we are here to debate a broken promise. As I said, we cannot support broken promises. We cannot support encouraging people to leave private health insurance or downgrade their private health insurance. We cannot support overloading an already overloaded and stressed hospital system right throughout Australia. Hence we shall be here as one voting this legislation down, as we should. I thank the Senate.