Murray Watt (Queensland, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to make a short contribution on the Medicare Guarantee Bill 2017. Really, my primary objective is to commit Labor, once more, to one of Australia's great institutions, and that is Medicare. We, on the Labor side of this chamber, are extremely proud of Medicare. We have always been great defenders of it. We initiated it back in the Whitlam-Hayden years. It was taken away by the Fraser government, aided and abetted by former Treasurer John Howard. The Hawke-Keating government brought it back. When John Howard finally became the Prime Minister of this country, we saw repeated attempts by the conservatives to whittle away Medicare and whittle away public health care in this country, and we are very proud that, again, the Rudd-Gillard government backed in Medicare. We see this repeated cycle in Australian politics: every time there is a Labor government in power federally we see attempts to strengthen Medicare, and every time we see a conservative government elected in this country we see repeated attempts to whittle away Medicare, undermine public health and boost private health at the expense of everyday Australians.

On this very day, when this bill was debated in the House, the opposition repeatedly gave the government opportunities to take a stand for Medicare. We gave them the opportunity to do something that was actually tangible behind this so-called Medicare Guarantee Bill. We gave them the opportunity to guarantee that Medicare would last well into the future, would continue to serve everyday Australians and would provide them with the public health care that they deserve and that they pay their taxes for, but this government did not want to do that.

This bill is a so-called Medicare guarantee bill but all it actually guarantees is that a source of funds exists for Medicare which already exists in consolidated revenue. This is just a pea-and-thimble trick by this government, which we know is not committed to Medicare, which in its last term of office tried to privatise Medicare. We see a look of horror from the government every time you talk about their attempts to privatise Medicare, but that is borne out by the facts—they tried to outsource Medicare claims processing to the private sector. The mere mention that this government want to privatise Medicare is greeted with howls of disbelief, which demonstrates exactly how sensitive they are to the reality that they do have a very long history, going back 30 years, of trying to undermine Medicare.

Today our Labor counterparts in the House of Representatives tried to give the government the opportunity to put some flesh on this legislation and demonstrate that they actually did guarantee Medicare, that they would continue to provide decent rebates for people receiving Medicare funded services and to provide GPs with rebates that actually increase not in two, three or four years time but immediately. But every time that this government was given the opportunity to put some flesh on its bones and demonstrate a real guarantee to Medicare, they ran the other way. I am sure I was not the only senator looking up over the course of the afternoon to see bell after bell being rung in the House of Representatives and wondering what on earth was going on. What was going on was that this government repeatedly failed to back amendments that Labor moved in the House of Representatives to actually guarantee Medicare, to actually guarantee that all Australians would receive quality public health care no matter who they were, no matter where they lived. Every single time one of those amendments was put in the House of Representatives today government members toddled in and voted against it.

We know that this is a government that knows the cost of everything and the value of nothing. Today was a prime example—they had the opportunity to vote for real guarantees to Medicare, to really guarantee that all Australian's would receive quality public health care. They voted against it repeatedly in the House and I have no doubt that they will vote against it in the Senate this evening. Australians have been watching this debate for long enough to know who the real defenders of Medicare are, and they are the people sitting on this side of the chamber—not the conservative parties, who take every opportunity they can to undermine public health care in Australia. Let us hope that at some point this government does listen to Australians and really does come forward with a genuine guarantee of Medicare rather than some ridiculous accounting trick that is not actually backed up by any weight or any substance, any commitment, to properly fund Medicare, to properly fund public health care into the future. Labor is the party of Medicare—we will always be that—and the Liberals continue to show that they do not understand it.