George Brandis (Queensland, Liberal Party, Shadow Attorney-General) Share this | Hansard source

The legislation that the Senate is considering to abolish the private health insurance rebate is but the latest instalment in the Australian Labor Party's assault on the Australian middle class. For as long as I have been a senator, I have listened wearily to Labor politicians like Senator Kim Carr over there claim that the Labor Party's purpose is to look after struggling disadvantaged people and I have heard Labor politicians mock my side of politics and say we look after the interests of the well-to-do. But, if you look at this piece of legislation, nothing could be further from the truth because we in the coalition stand with ordinary Australians, everyday Australian families, middle-class Australians, working-class Australians, Australian working families who want to be able to have affordable private health insurance, and the Labor Party stands resolutely against the interests of those people.

Senator Cormann quoted some figures, and forgive me for repeating some of the observations that he made but they cannot be said often enough. The fact is that Australians want private health insurance: 53 per cent of Australians, 12 million people, have private health insurance. They are not the wealthy. I am sure most wealthy people have private health insurance, but the proportion of the private health insurance holders in Australia who could be regarded as wealthy or well-to-do is miniscule. The vast majority of Australians who have private health insurance are middle-class people, working people, working families who do not want to be reliant on the state, who do not want to be reliant on a state system, who want to look after themselves, who want to look after their children and who are prepared to make the extra sacrifices, work the extra few hours a week of overtime, to make that possible. They are aspirational Australians, not the well-to-do, not the toffs that you, Mr Acting Deputy President Cameron, occasionally mock, but everyday people. This is an attack on them. It is an attack on their wellbeing, it is an attack on their standard of living, and it is unconscionable.

Not only do 53 per cent of Australians currently have private health insurance but 46 per cent of Australians, almost as many, have hospital treatment cover and, of the people who hold private health insurance, 5.6 million—almost half of them—have annual household incomes of less than $50,000. When almost half of the people who make the sacrifice to pay for private health insurance are earning less than $50,000, what clown—what socialist dreamer—could possibly say private health insurance is the preserve of the wealthy? The whole point of having a private health insurance rebate is to make it affordable to as many people as possible down the income scale. That is why almost half of the people who hold private health insurance earn less than $50,000 a year. It is because coalition governments in years gone by have made it affordable for them.

This Labor government, which was elected in 2007 on the claim that it represented the interests of Australian working families, will make it harder for those poorer Australians—those less well off Australians—to be able to afford private health insurance. So much for the pieties and the crocodile tears of the Australian Labor Party about the interests of less well off Australians. Not only do 5.6 million of the 12 million Australians who hold private health insurance have incomes of less than $50,000 but 3.4 million of them—between a quarter and a third—have an annual household income of less than $35,000. I am sure we all know people—members of our families, people in our neighbourhood, people we know through the workplace—who struggle to keep private health insurance going because they do not want to be dependent on a state system. What an insult to those people, particularly coming from a party that falsely claims to represent the less well-to-do. What an insult to those people to say: 'We will make it less affordable for you. We will force you to be dependent on the state system when you would wish to look after yourself by paying that extra little bit of money for private health insurance.' What an insult to the poor, Senator Kim Carr. What an insult to the strugglers. What an insult to working families of Australia. And yet you sit there complacently, pleased with yourself, thinking that somehow, in some perverse way, this will advance social justice. It does not advance social justice, Senator Carr, to make life harder for poorer people, and that is what this will do. It will make life harder for poorer people. What a disgrace.

Not only is this measure profoundly inequitable—the reverse of social justice—it is also, as Senator Cormann pointed out, bad policy. What it will do is not merely make private health insurance less affordable to poorer people by driving up the cost of premiums; it will force more people into the public system and drive up the cost burdens on the public system. How foolish can that be at a time when there are enormous cost burdens on the health and hospital systems of Australia? And those burdens are escalating with every passing year. We have a measure which will make self-sufficiency harder by making it more difficult for people to insure themselves and, therefore, drive them into the public system, therefore increasing the costs of the public system. So whatever budget savings it might be imagined would be clawed back by this meretricious, dishonest and foolish policy are going to be but a fraction of the additional cost burdens imposed upon the public system and imposed upon public hospitals. What a foolish piece of public policy that is. It is a lose-lose proposition. You make less-well-to-do and poorer people poorer still, you make them dependants upon the state when they wish to be self-sufficient and you impose greater cost burdens on the state system so the state system into which these people have been thrown against their own wishes can less easily cope with that additional burden. So the overall quality of health care in Australia deteriorates. What an extraordinarily inept piece of public policy.

Not only does this measure suffer from the vice of being unjust because it punishes the least well-off people in our country; not only does it suffer from the vice of being foolish public policy because the outcome that will result is the opposite of the objective the policy seeks to serve, which is making the health system more efficient; it is, of course—and this is such a familiar refrain from the Rudd and the Gillard governments—built on a lie. Let us remember who it was who said: 'There will be no carbon tax under the government I lead,' and then introduced the world's greatest carbon tax and congratulated herself on doing do, celebrating her blatant deception of the Australian people by high-fiving her ministers on the floor of the House of Representatives, in one of the most shameful episodes in the history of Australian democracy.