Simon Birmingham (SA, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for the Murray Darling Basin) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the Senate for the opportunity to speak on these important pieces of legislation, 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]. These are measures that speak volumes of the contempt that the Rudd government holds for the Australian people and for what the ALP said and did going into the last election. This legislation is a clear example of the government saying one thing to get elected and doing another thing in office. That is the tragedy behind so many stories of the way that the Rudd government has approached these things. But private health insurance stands out as one of the strongest and clearest examples of failings by the government to live up to its word and to live up to the promises that it made to millions of Australians.

Private health insurance is an issue that affects all Australians, whether they have it or they do not. That is something that is often misunderstood and misinterpreted by those on the other side in the way that they present information in this debate. A strong private health insurance industry helps all aspects of the health sector. A strong private health insurance sector that keeps people utilising private hospitals and private health facilities reduces demand on the public health sector. It is a very simple formula. It reduces demand on public hospitals and, in doing so, helps to ease what are very long and unacceptable waiting lists and delays at a state level.

The problem with the approaches and the policies of the Rudd government is that they will reduce the incentives for people to take out private health insurance and strip support for the taking out of private health insurance from many thousands of Australians. In doing so, they will ensure that the take-up rate of private health insurance is lower and that public support for and utilisation of the private healthcare sector is reduced. As a consequence, demand and pressure on the public sector will increase.

That is why this issue affects all Australians, whether they have private health insurance or not. All Australians should be concerned that this government—which promised not to fiddle with private health insurance rebates and which from Prime Minister Rudd down gave its solemn word in the run-up to the last election that it would not change anything—wants to break its promise on this and that, for the second time around, has brought legislation to this place to try to break its promise in this key area. Once again, we see the Australian Senate acting as both the barrier between the government and the breaking of its own promises and the body that tries to keep the government honest on what it delivers to the Australian people.

Between nine and 10 million Australians have private health insurance, and many of these people will be directly impacted by the changes that this government is attempting to introduce. We know that when Labor was last in power the private health insurance sector was a shadow of what it is today. It was a shadow of what the Howard government helped it to build itself up to. We saw during that period of Labor government that the participation rates in private health insurance dropped from 67 per cent in 1983 to just 33½ per cent in 1996. In 13 years of the Hawke-Keating Labor government attempting to manage private health insurance we saw this massive reduction—that is, a halving of participation in the private health insurance sector.

What will we see under the Rudd government? Based on its current policy and approaches, we will see the same type of outcome. We will see that its attacks on the health insurance sector and the taxes that it is applying to ordinary Australians who want to do their bit to look after themselves, their families and their health insurance will cause these rates to plummet yet again. The government broke its word to the Australian people after the last election, and I am sure that this will be the first of many assaults that this government launches on the health insurance sector, the nearly 10 million Australians who have health insurance and every single Australian who has an interest in the private health sector and, indeed, the health sector overall.

This debate impacts on every single electorate across Australia. Many of the South Australian electorates are directly affected by private health insurance. South Australia has among the highest numbers of older Australians in Australia. Older Australians cling to their private health insurance because they know how important it is. They go without to hold onto their private health insurance because they know how important it is. South Australians in every one of our federal electorates hold onto their private health insurance because they know how important it is for them to be able to access the private healthcare system, to do their bit to look after themselves and, in doing so, to ease the pressures on the public healthcare sector.

Let us look at some of those electorates where there will be a very direct impact on thousands and thousands of South Australians. In the electorate of Wakefield, there are some 44,567 voters who are estimated to have private health insurance. Nearly 63,000 people across the electorate are covered by that insurance—families with younger people—