Anne Ruston (SA, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise today to put on the record that it is interesting that we have been hearing a lot of debate from the other side about the badness of this so-called co-payment policy. Even Senator Brown, in her opening remarks, made the comment that it was bad health policy. It is tremendously interesting that it was actually the Labor Party that first introduced a Medicare co-payment, back in 1991. Their current shadow Assistant Treasurer, Andrew Leigh, has strongly advocated for a co-payment. He is quoted as saying:

As economists have shown, the ideal modelling involves a small co-payment. Not enough to put a dent in your weekly budget, but enough to make you think twice before you call the doc.

The idea is hardly radical, so I find it really quite bizarre that we are having this debate right now about the co-payment being such bad policy when it started life as Labor Party policy. In relation to the PBS, it is the same thing. We have had a co-payment on the PBS since 1960. That is 50 years for which we have had a co-payment. Right through this entire time the Labor Party has supported this co-payment measure. In 1986, the Labor government increased the general co-payment on the PBS from $5 to $10—a 100 per cent increase. In 1990, the Labor government introduced for the very first time a PBS co-payment on pensioners. In 2004, the Labor opposition, with Julia Gillard as the shadow health minister, supported a $4.90 increase in the general PBS co-payment and an 80c increase in the concessional PBS co-payment. As you can see from these comments, this is hardly a new thing. This has not been a bolt out of the blue or some radical new policy that nobody has ever heard of or ever considered. The fact remains: why is the coalition government having to introduce any of these policies in the first place? It is simply because we have a budget mess that needs to be fixed.

Everybody would like to think that we could go on in life with universal health care, with universal education and with all these wonderful things that over the last 20 years Australians have come to accept as a given. Unfortunately, the credit card is maxed out. That is exactly what has happened here. The Australian Labor Party, in the six years they were in government, maxed out Australia's credit card. There comes a time when all responsible fiscal managers—and that includes the Greens if they are going to play in this space—realise that we cannot continue to spend beyond our means. When the coalition government came to power in September last year, we realised we had a number of things we had to do. One was to get the budget situation back into some semblance of order.

Another thing we realised we needed to do for the long-term benefit of all Australians was to make sure that we have a sustainable ongoing Medicare system. To do that, we obviously had to make some changes, because the rapid growth of expenditure that was occurring in the health space was completely and utterly unsustainable. Those opposite can go on all they like about there not being a budget emergency, but in the medical benefits sphere the growth in spending had gone from $8 billion a decade ago to $20 billion today and was projected to be $34 billion in 10 years time. You do not have to be an economist, like Andrew Leigh, to work out that that is an unsustainable trajectory in terms of growth and the growth in expenditure. What we needed to do, and what we have done, is come up with a policy—it is not a radical new policy, but a policy in the past of those opposite, and one that in some instances is still a policy of those opposite—so that we can build a sustainable long-term medical system, understanding that we have to make sure that it is as affordable today as it was in the past and into the future.

To correct the record in relation to the constant carping about cuts to the health budget: we have not cut the health budget.