Gary Humphries (ACT, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Citizenship) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to also draw attention to the hypocrisy of the Rudd Labor government in seeking to break the promise it made to the Australian people at the 2007 election that it would not interfere with the rebate applicable for private health insurance in Australia. I followed this issue very closely in the role I played at the time as Chair of the Senate Standing Committee on Community Affairs, which overviews the Department of Health and Ageing, and also at the time of the 2007 election as a senator who was under considerable attack from a number of parties, including the Australian Labor Party, on the basis that I represented a Senate which had ceased to be accountable to the Australian people and that I represented a government controlled Senate which was incapable of holding the government of the day to account. I am sure members of this place will recall the very strong campaign steered by the organisation called GetUp! in which the argument was put very strongly that people should take back control of their Senate, that the Senate belonged to the people of Australia. We even had the Labor Party, the Greens and the Democrats uniting in television ads to appeal to voters to deprive the Howard government of its majority in the Senate. The argument was that the Senate was not able to perform its duty as a body which would question and hold to account the government of the day if the government had the numbers to control it.

How things have change. Now, a bit over two years later, we have a new government and a Senate which is not controlled by the government and we have the Senate proposing, with its opposition to this legislation, to hold the government to account for the promises it made to the people of Australia at the 2007 election. The Australian Labor Party, which were so very keen two years ago to give the Senate the power to block governments which did things they said they would not do at elections, now have done a 180 degree turn and believe that the Senate ought to pass this legislation and ought to allow the government to break the promise they solemnly made to the Australian people at that election—that they would not interfere with the private health insurance rebate. I have to say that I do not think the Senate should do that.

The Senate has acknowledged that the balance in our health system between publicly funded health care and privately supported health care is an extremely important balance to be struck and that our system would become unsupportable and unsustainable in this country if it were unable to provide for people to afford to take out private health insurance and contribute through their own pockets to greater choice in the provision of health care and to the greater financial sustainability of the entire health system. That is such an obviously true statement; it is almost an axiomatic statement that it rather explains the comments by the then shadow minister for health in September 2007, when she solemnly intoned:

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.

She went on to attack the Liberal Party for daring to suggest that the government had other intentions. She said:

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

It was not untrue; it was perfectly true. We drew attention, as Senator Ryan has pointed out in this debate, to the strong underlying hostility of the Australian Labor Party towards private health. We drew attention to the tendency of the Labor Party to want to undermine the mechanisms we had put in place to make private health insurance both more affordable and more sustainable. We predicted—as it turns out, perfectly accurately—that a Labor government would indeed attempt to wind back on our reforms in this area—reforms which had led to almost 45 per cent of all Australians having taken out private health insurance and thereby improving the capacity of our health system to deliver timely outcomes to Australians and taking pressure off our public hospital system at the same time.

I make no apologies for throwing this legislation back in the face of the Labor government and saying that it has absolutely no right to come to this place and expect the Senate to pass this legislation. It is a disgrace. It amounts to a betrayal of the people of Australia, who were told so many things about what this Labor government would do and who have been deceived on so many occasions in the process. The fact is that the balance in our health system is critical to maintaining an effective health system. It is at the heart of a health system which is, relatively speaking, the envy of many nations around the world. It is a balance in the system which preserves the capacity of people to make choices and to obtain care when they need it in general terms.

This legislation amounts to a tax on health insurance. It will make it harder for people on higher incomes to sustain their private health insurance. It is very likely in the medium- to long-term to lead to people giving up their private health insurance. In some ways, the only reason we have not seen a greater flight from private health insurance is that the public health system, over which so many Labor governments in this country preside, is for many people simply too scary to contemplate as their only safety net in the event that they become unwell. So we have the prospect in this debate of the legislation, if it is passed, undermining the capacity of Australians to afford private health insurance and placing a greater burden on the shoulders of our public hospitals around Australia because people will have given up private health insurance. If this legislation were to pass, there would certainly be an increase in premiums for all Australians who have private health insurance—and not many of those are on higher incomes.

We can see many unfortunate consequences of this legislation. We can see that the government has not thought through the implications of what it is doing here. We know this because the government has a policy on health which is all over the shop. The government was not going to take away the rebates, and now it is. The government was going to fix the public hospital system by 1 July 2009, and it has not. The government was going to hold a referendum to take control of the public hospital system if it had not been fixed by 1 July 2009, and we have no idea whether it intends to do that or not. I suspect that the government is, at this stage, completely at a loss as to what its policy should be.

The Senate is perfectly entitled to say to this government: ‘Go away and sort your policies out. Decide what you want to do. Decide how you’re going to deal with the crisis in Australian health and then come back with a plan to the Australian people and the Senate.’ In the absence of that plan, of that indication of how it is going to deal with this problem, health is a political plaything for this government, and the Senate is perfectly entitled to refuse to play that game. We are entitled to say that we will not engage in the process of passing legislation, the implications of which have simply not been thought through. The government has not explained how it will deal with the extra pressure which this legislation, if passed, would place on our public hospitals.

Every one of us in this place has heard stories of a hospital system in crisis, of longer waiting lists for elective surgery, of people fronting up to emergency departments and being unable to be treated, of people receiving absolutely shocking outcomes in the course of their accessing services in public hospitals. I acknowledge that that is not the universal experience and that many people get very good quality service from our public hospitals; but, regrettably, the number of times that the system fails because of pressure on it is very large, and that is unacceptable. We in this place have a duty to try and mitigate that occurring. This government does not seem to care about that. It wants to put pressure back on the public hospital system, and there is no plan or strategy for dealing with that in this legislation or elsewhere.

We simply assume that the government will somehow be able to persuade state governments or perhaps pay state governments to lift their game with respect to the performance of the public hospital system in order to cope with the additional demand, which surely will be the outcome of this legislation. All I can say to them is that, if that is their tactic, ‘Good luck’, because, frankly, the public hospital system in this country is creaking and groaning from the pressure that it is already under. It simply cannot afford to be placed under greater pressure.

We made it clear that the devices that we were putting in place were designed to support the capacity of Australians to make choices within the health system. We wanted that safety net to be a strong one for Australians who could not afford private health insurance or who chose not to take it out, so that there would still be access to decent quality services to the extent that we could influence that happening. During our time in government, we continued to strengthen the resourcing available to our public hospitals. Let us put to bed very firmly at this point in the debate the myth, which Labor has chosen to pursue and repeated in question time yesterday in this place, that the coalition took a billion dollars out of the public health system. You know that is not true. You know that is simply a falsehood. In every year that we were in government we continued to support to a greater extent the health burden taken on by the states through their public hospitals. When we came into government in 1996, we were supporting public hospitals run by the states to the tune of a little over $5 billion. When we left office in 2007, we had support running at twice that amount at a little short of $11 billion annually. So it simply is not true to say that any money was taken out of that system. But the amounts that we put into the public hospital system would simply not have been adequate to deal with the kind of crisis which the present Rudd government is seeking to shift onto the shoulders of our public hospital system. It simply will not be able to cope if this legislation passes and I sincerely hope that the Senate will not allow that to happen.

We also had the Labor opposition throughout the 11 years of the Howard government continually attacking rises in private health insurance premiums. Every increase in a premium that occurred was ritually attacked by the relevant shadow minister, whoever it might have been, and accusing fingers were pointed at the coalition for allowing this to occur. I note that there have been very significant increases in premiums. The minister for health herself was warning only a few days ago about some very significant increases coming down the line. She appeared to be shaking her finger in the direction of the health funds. When premiums went up under us, it was the government at whom the relevant shadow minister shook his or her finger, not the health funds. Why wasn’t the government doing something about rising health insurance premiums? That does not appear to be the policy of the present Rudd Labor government. They are choosing to blame private health insurance companies and frankly I think that is unfair. It will be absolutely unfair if this legislation is passed because the inevitable consequence will be that there will have to be a substantial increase over time in insurance premiums to account for those people who will leave the system. Of that there can be absolutely no doubt.

I think that the government has very badly failed to plan ahead for the needs of our health system, and the irony is considerable indeed that by all accounts we are seeing an increase in the government’s focus on health as a political weapon in the lead-up to the coming election. What was in prospect at one stage—an election based around the emissions trading scheme—seems to be evaporating in favour of an election built around health. With such a confused and incomplete picture of what it wants to do with the health system, with endless reports and reviews having put information on its table but without any tangible action to follow from that work, with a policy to increase the cost of private health insurance but no plan to support public health as a result of that policy, with all of these mismatched and confused policies in place it is astonishing that the government would expect the Australian people to trust it on the question of health at the coming election. But apparently that is what it is planning to do.

I think the Australian people are growing more cynical by the day with respect to what this government wants to do. They were a little more cynical when they saw the government attempt to cut rebates for cataract surgery, something which the government had mentioned nothing about before the 2007 election but which apparently became an area of high priority for them to pass. They banged their fists on the table in the Senate and said: ‘We must have this reform. Forget the fact that we did not mention this to the Australian people prior to the 2007 election.’ They said this was an essential reform. We were told that a cut in the rebate for assisted reproductive technology also had to occur, and again there was no mention of that being necessary before the 2007 election. The mother of them all was the government insisting that it is essential to their health reforms, such as they are, that they be able to rip billions of dollars out of private health insurance rebates. We even had the extraordinary claim that, if we did not pass this legislation, there were going to be tens of billions of dollars less available in the health system in the future to deal with challenges in the sector. Of course, if you are taking money away from a rebate and there is no hypothecation of the saving that you are making going back into the health system, then it is perfectly reasonable to assume that the money being taken out is not going to end up in the health system, and nothing in this legislation provides any guarantee or comfort that it will in fact be the case.

On my submission, the Senate is entitled to reject this legislation comprehensively, and to remind the Australian people that this is yet another broken promise by this Rudd Labor government, which is drifting, confused and unable to put together a coherent plan for health, much less the whole set of challenges facing the Australian community. The Senate is doing its job, the job it is supposed to be doing, the job it was set up by the Australian people to do, by rejecting this legislation, because we are holding the government to account. It promised not to interfere with private health insurance rebates and the Senate is absolutely entitled in those circumstances to say, ‘No, we will not support legislation for you to break the promise you made solemnly to the Australian people in 2007.’