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

'A man of vision.' I would say a man of betrayal to his electorate, Senator Feeney, who was complicit in the carbon tax and complicit with the Prime Minister, Ms Gillard, who said there would be no carbon tax. Mr Oakeshott was complicit, along with Mr Windsor, in betraying the Australian people with that broken promise. I go back to my point: the Australian people do not trust you, and why should they, when you are doing backflip after backflip with your money mismanagement and your waste and your new taxes, crippling the private sector? That is what you are about. Let us have a look at what Mr Oakeshott did. Mr Oakeshott is prepared to walk away from the people of Lyne on this, just as he did on the carbon tax and the independent youth allowance, where the people in Lyne, New England and those inner regions suffered until my colleague Senator Nash fought the fight of millions to finally bring the government around to having some sort of conscience for those people from regional areas who want to go to university. I will quote from the Port Macquarie News of 11 February. Under the headline 'Nurses make their feelings known' it says:

Dozens of nurses from Port Macquarie and Coffs Harbour rallied outside Rob Oakeshott's electoral office this morning, in an attempt to sway the MP away from voting for means testing the private health insurance rebate.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Mr Oakeshott's Clarence St office was empty.

Here is another one, from the Port Macquarie Independent, headed, 'Oakeshott's health decision slammed'. It says: 'Ramsay Health Care chief executive Christopher Rex has hit back at Rob Oakeshott's decision to support means testing of the private health insurance rebate, saying that, in his view, the legislation represented poor policy and could have an impact in rural and regional areas like Port Macquarie. According to Mr Rex, Mr Oakeshott never visited the Port Macquarie Private Hospital.' That is not surprising. I will repeat that: 'According to Mr Rex, Mr Oakeshott never visited the Port Macquarie Private Hospital to hear the concerns of doctors but relied on one line out of a release in August 2011 as the key justification for his decision.' This is amazing. That is what this legislation is doing here in the Senate and that is why it is in front of us: Rob Oakeshott sided with his Labor colleagues—as he did after the August 2012 election and gave the government the numbers to pass it through the House of Representatives.

Here is my concern: people will leave the private health system. They will leave in droves and downgrade their level of insurance because they simply cannot afford it. It will be the Aussie battlers, those working families that Labor once used to stick up for about a hundred years ago and have not since. They are the ones who will downgrade their level of insurance. Some will leave. There is no doubt that some will leave. Let us have a look at what will happen then. As they leave, the insurance companies will be forced to raise their premiums. Then more will leave and, as they leave, they will simply put more pressure on our public health system—our public hospital system run by the states. I asked a question in this place a couple of years ago about the Greater Western Area Health Service in western New South Wales. The butchers had cut off supplying meat to Gilgandra and Coonamble hospitals. Why? Because they had not been paid. That was the state of New South Wales Health—under, of course, a Labor government. When a small business has to cut off supplying meat to a country hospital, then you have a serious problem. And what are you going to do with this legislation? You are going to dump more onto that same hospital system that is already under enormous stress. That is the problem we face.

The system used to be very good. I remember when I left school and the first year I was working, in 1973. At that time everyone took out private health insurance. It used to cost me about $100 a year—quite a bit of money in those days but affordable. Along came Prime Minister Whitlam and Medibank—he went, of course, but not soon enough—and then I was paying $400 a year, so I dropped out of private health insurance. I lived in a country town and I thought I would take a punt and drop out of it. It was only 3½ or four years ago that I rejoined private health insurance. I had pulled out because I simply could not afford it as the price of insurance went up and up and up. And that is the problem we face—that when more people pull out there is more stress on our public health system. You only have to go to a place such as Ashford, which I visited a couple of weeks ago, to see this. The community health centre there is run by Hunter New England Health, who do their best under pretty tough circumstances and budget restrictions. Every time it rains the roof leaks severely and the water runs down the walls. The building needs a new roof and it needs to be painted inside. The staff there just get on with doing their job, and they do a wonderful job. But the problems they face are the sorts of problems we have in the public health system simply due to the lack of funds.

Perhaps we should just let the states raise their royalties on minerals, giving them some more money to carry out their duties in their health systems, but the government want to go after those as well. We know why. It is because they are broke; it is as simple as that. They have committed to a budget this May that will go into surplus next financial year. Let us go back and look back what happened with the current budget. Two years ago, they budgeted for a deficit of $12 billion for the current financial year. In the May budget last year that was budgeted at $22 billion. Now we find that the budget for this financial year is going to be $37 billion in the red. We have gone from an estimated $12 billion two years ago to $37 billion. So what this measure is about is transferring the cost from the federal budget bottom line to the states. This is a financial saving, as they see it, for the federal budget bottom line, but when people pull out of private health insurance, and they will, this will just put more costs on the states. That is what this is about: transferring actual costs from the federal budget to the states.

Let us look at specialist services. Visiting specialists attend regional private hospitals, and thank goodness they do. Any tinkering with the rebate that causes a cutback in demand in regional private hospitals will flow directly to specialists, who will retreat back to the cities. We need the surgery to be carried out so that those surgeons can make some money in their profession, but if they do not do that in regional areas then they will go back to the cities where they can be flat out all the time in the bigger populations. This is a problem, denying regional patients local access to the expertise and services they need and forcing those patients to travel further, and at greater cost, for consultations and treatments.

It is too simplistic to assume that not enough people in regional areas would be affected by the proposed means test thresholds, of $80,000 for singles and $160,000 for couples, to warrant concern. Once the insurance pool shrinks, when people leave insurance and so the number paying the premiums shrinks, premiums go up. Research last year by Deloitte's shows that 1.6 million people in the government's targeted annual income range will dump their private hospital cover, with another 4.3 million downgrading their cover. I will repeat those figures. Deloitte's are saying 1.6 million people will dump their private hospital cover, with another 4.3 million downgrading. The initial exodus will force premiums up an estimated 10 per cent for those left in health schemes, putting health insurance beyond the reach of lower income earners and causing a second exodus. This is the problem—the domino effect. The fact is that 5.6 million Australians with private cover earn less than $50,000 a year. They cannot afford massive increases in their premiums. You will see more of them exiting the system. Deloitte's adds that public hospitals will be overrun as more than 845,000 extra admissions will pour through their doors. I repeat: 845,000 extra admissions. This is the problem. I would not say that Deloitte's is a company whose modelling and research findings you would disregard.