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

Thank you very much Mr Acting Deputy President. You obviously were not playing it yourself—it was not a popular game in Scotland, no doubt. Or you were too young—or possibly too old? I would not venture which that might be—but thank you. The game springs to mind in the course of this debate because it rather seems to me that the federal Labor government is playing a game of pulling out a stick from this structure of public and private hospital and health infrastructure in Australia—a stick worth $2.8 billion over the forward estimates. It is hoping—it is not necessarily very sure, but it is hoping—as it pulls this stick out that somehow the marbles do not fall and that the people in the private health system who have private health insurance and who are taking a load off the public hospital system at the bottom of the column do not cascade down into the bottom of that column. That gamble is—