Fiona Nash (NSW, National Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Regional Education) Share this | Hansard source

I always think that the Australian people are very positive and are always looking for the bright light at the end of the tunnel. They have a positive outlook on the future of Australia, which is why they get so incredibly frustrated and disappointed that this Gillard-Rudd-Smith-Shorten-Carr-Greens-Independent Labor government keep giving the Australian people such bad policy. I had better correct that. I was referring to Senator Bob Carr and not Senator Kim Carr; Senator Bob Carr is clearly the smart one.

We have the Australian people in the situation where the government is continuing to foist upon them bad policy. It is happening time and time again. As I travel through mostly regional communities, there is a sense of a lack of confidence in this government that it can actually deliver anything properly for this nation. As somebody said to me the other day, 'This Labor government is choking this country,' and it is. It is doing it because there is so little good policy, substantive policy, that we see coming from the government. This private health insur­ance legislation is absolutely no different.

Isn't it interesting, colleagues, that on the other side of the chamber with the Labor government over there and in the other place, they are continuing to harangue the coalition and harangue the leader, Tony Abbott, about being negative and about saying no. If the government could at any stage give us some good policy for the Australian people, we would not have to keep saying no. The only reason we are saying no is because the government continue to give us such bad, ill-thought-through policy on the run. We only have to look at the private health insurance legislation before us to see yet another example of this.

It is just stupidity to take away the incentive and place an impost on the Australian people which is going to lead to them dropping their private health cover and is going to push them into the public system. That is just completely stupid. The public system is already completely overloaded. I take my hat off to the men and women, the doctors, the nurses and staff, in our public health system who work so hard in very, very difficult situations. But here we have a government that is planning on making it more difficult for those health workers, making it more difficult for the public system to cope because it is planning to put more pressure on that system through the people who are going to leave private health insurance. It is just completely illogical for the government to come up with a policy that says, 'We're going to make things even worse for the public health system.' The health system cannot bear any more; it is at stretched point. There is no doubt about that.

What else are we going to see? We see a deterioration of the risk pool. What is that going to do? That is going to increase premiums for those still remaining in private health insurance. The government come up with arguments that they think are appropriate for why this should be happening, but at the end of the day it is going to put costs up for those people who are going to remain in the private health system. It is interesting, isn't it? We often see the Labor government implying that private health insurance is for the rich. It is not. It is actually for people who are taking the opportunity to make sure that they have the financial support they need at times when their health is at risk. That makes sense, and that is why we brought it in in the first place. But this government is prepared to say that private health insurance is for the rich.

It is interesting: 5.6 million people with private health insurance have an annual household income of less than $50,000, and 3.4 million have an annual household income of less than $35,000. I know that the government will argue that that does not apply under the changes. But it does. By association, by those risks that are put in place, the costs are going to go up for people remaining in private health insurance, because of the critical mass of people who will now shift out of private health insurance into the public system. Those people will be affected, and they will be affected quite badly. So for the government to say in any way shape or form that those people are not affected is simply untrue.

When we look at the Medicare system and how it is going to be impacted by this, it is just extraordinary that the government clearly does not realise what the impact of this is going to be. I take Senator Xenophon's point that he made earlier about unintended consequences. I think that there are going to be many. Coming back to my initial point, the government is simply not thinking through policy properly. And, as Minister Conroy has just joined us, the NBN is a classic example of policy that has not been thought through properly—but I will get to that a little bit later.

I also just want to touch on another point that Senator Xenophon raised, about ancillary cover. This is the importance of allied health and the fact that the work has not been done to see what the impact is going to be from the resultant changes on those who have ancillary cover now. This is a real problem. It is going to be a real issue, particularly for regional communities, where getting access to allied health is a real problem, as my good colleague Senator Macdonald would know very well. So what impact is this change going to have on the provision of those services, particularly to people in regional communities?

I doubt that the government has an answer. Perhaps, if we have time, during the committee stage we may be able to get some kind of response from the government—perhaps a few moments here or there, seeing that they are keen on guillotining just about everything at the moment. But what impact is that going to have? I suspect that the government have absolutely no idea what that impact is going to be. I suspect that the government have not even considered it, because it has become quite obvious over many months and years of Labor government now that the government simply do not understand regional Australia. They do not understand the impact that their bodgie, ill-thought-through policies are having, particularly on our regional communities.

When we look at the changes and the direct analysis of what this is going to do, there are going to be 2.4 million people directly affected with the immediate increases in the premiums at 14 per cent, 29 per cent and 43 per cent in the respective income tiers for those under 65. Isn't that interesting? Reflecting on what I said before, I will just quote the shadow minister, Peter Dutton, because I think he put it very clearly: 'There are 12 million Australians who have private health insurance. It is not the playground of the rich, because, of that 12 million, almost six million people are on incomes of less than $50,000, and over time everybody's premiums will go up if you drive the healthy and the young out of private health insurance.' It says it all, really, and the government clearly do not understand that implication. They clearly have no understanding, even though the government owned insurer, Medibank Private, predicted 37,000 of their members alone will drop their cover and that 92½ thousand will downgrade.

I know that many of my colleagues have quoted the Deloitte analysis, but I think it is worth while doing it again. In the first year, 175,000 people would be expected to withdraw from private hospital cover and a further 583,000 to downgrade it. Over five years, 1.6 million will drop cover and 4.3 million will downgrade. Private health insurance premiums will rise 10 per cent above what they would otherwise be, there will be $3.8 billion in additional recurrent costs for the public hospital system and there will be $4.6 billion in revenue removed from the private sector as a result of consumers withdrawing and downgrading their private health cover.

How can anybody look at those facts and think that this is any kind of sensible, balanced, well-thought-through policy whatsoever? You cannot. You simply cannot do that. Again, the government in its inability to properly think through policy has come up with yet another dog. Why should we be surprised, colleagues? We have had years and years of shambolic policy from this government, and this is just another example.

I think it is worth while, for the benefit of the Senate and those who may be listening, running through some of those shambolic policies to show the form that the government has in its absolute inability to govern this country properly. Firstly—and I know that my very good colleague Senator Cash will know all about this one—Labor's failed border protection policies, which have blown out the immigration budget by around $4 billion over the last three years and where more than $5 million has been spent on preparing the government's abandoned Malaysian people swap deal. I have to commend Senator Cash for the work she has done in this area. Very few people understand it better than she does. But what a mess! What an absolute mess! And it is all the fault of this government. It changed a policy that was working. There were no boats. And yet now we see from this government an absolutely shambolic piece of policy that has resulted in the chaos that we have when it comes to our border protection.

And who could forget the Home Insulation Program, the pink batts? There was $2.5 billion mismanaged, with at least $500 million to be spent fixing the mistakes. Computers in Schools: a $1.4 billion blowout and way behind schedule. Green Loans and Green Start: $175 million for the Green Loans Program mismanaged and then eventually dumped, then replaced with the $130 million Green Start program that never started! The solar homes program: $850 million blowout and the program cancelled. The program was originally meant to cost $150 million. There was the set-top box program at an average of $350 a home, but interestingly—