Julian McGauran (Victoria, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

When I started speaking on this last night, guess who waltzed in—the most ideological of them all, Senator Carr! Whatever influence he has in cabinet, he has got his fingerprints all over this. But we are not ideological—far from it. We do it on the grounds of good management policy and good health policy.

We have proved it in government. When we came into government the private health system was collapsing, making the Medicare system unsustainable. That was a fact. Even when you left government you accepted that. Some of your ministers, namely, Senator Richardson, even accepted that, and we had to pick up that system.

We had to tweak it in the first term. We introduced the surcharge in the first term. In the second term we introduced the 30 per cent rebate, and in the next term we introduced the third prong of our policy, the life cover. It requires a balance, and it was not until we put the three prongs in place that we got it right. It took several terms of government. And then you saw a surge in uptake of private health and, of course, the obvious rational effect—it is all very rational; it is not ideological: you take the burden off public hospitals so that those who need it—the needy people, those that deserve access to hospitals and are in urgent need, those underprivileged—will have access. That is why we seek a balance between private and public health. Madam Acting Deputy President, I am about to hand over to the former president who is well across this issue and, like him and all the previous speakers, I reject this legislation.