Bill Heffernan (NSW, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you. This document is an article from 21 November 2014 in the Australian Doctor. Lots of people would find it difficult to come to terms with a $7 co-payment; obviously lots of people could pay it. A packet of cigarettes is more, but not everyone smokes and not everyone buys a coffee every day. But there are places we can save money. Besides capturing our revenue base—and this is a serious problem which is going to redefine sovereignty if we do not fix it. There was $3 trillion in tax avoidance globally last year. This article points to where we could save some money:

The Professional Services Review said it was concerned about high-end claimers, including one GP working in a large suburban practice who drew up more than 400 management plans, 400 team care arrangements and then billed for 1,300 reviews in the space of 12 months.

This is where the doctor gets $250 to fill out a little form and send you down the road to have a care plan done for you.

On review of a sample of this practitioners plans, we noted little evidence of input from anyone other than the practice nurse.

I will go further into the article.

In another case investigated by the PSR, a GP generated $600,000 in Medicare billings during his first seven months practising in Australia.

That is $30,000 a week just billing Medicare—I do not how you would see the patients and think you were taking care of them.

We should put the politics aside. If we want to keep Australia the best place in the world to raise a family, to breathe fresh air and to drink clean water, for God's sake, let's get the politics out of the road. Let us not worry about what tomorrow's headline says or what the next election is going to be about. Let's look at what where we are going to be in 15 or 20 years' time as a nation. I do not want to be blamed for living through a period when our sovereignty was redefined because we did not allow the law to catch up with technology. When the present Foreign Acquisitions and Takeovers Act was written in 1975, we were just barely past the telegram era—and a lot of our laws were written when it took six weeks for the Australian cricket team to go to England by ship. We really need to understand that we need to redefine where we are in the world if we are to maintain our sovereignty.

Last year, the World Bank said there was about $1 trillion involved in bribes. You can get a signature on anything you like in Asia, as long as you find the right person to pay the bribe to. And the cost of those bribes—that is, the corruption that followed —was five per cent of global GDP. These are serious issues. It is a given these days that, to compete in the market, the big companies take as a given that they will pay little or no tax.

The average punter and certainly people listening to this—if there is anyone—would not know the derivative swap market. The derivative swap market is a serious deal as is the challenge of coming to terms with the bitcoin market, which will aid and abet tax avoidance, transfer, profits, drug laundering et cetera. So the great challenge for Australia—it does not matter who is in government—is to capture our revenue base. Let's first find out what is going wrong with what we are doing.