Katy Gallagher (ACT, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I know my colleagues have made a number of comments on essentially the accounting trick that has been moved in the Medicare Guarantee Bill and the Medicare Guarantee (Consequential Amendments) Bill to make it look like Medicare is guaranteed, but in practical terms these bills do very little. I would like to put on the record some comments about the use of special accounts and I think the broader push from this government to create special accounts. These are not bank accounts; they do not hold actual funds in them. I think Peter Martin, the economics editor for The Age, made an excellent point when writing about the government holding the NDIS to ransom with childcare cuts. He said there are no locked boxes, and there are no separate jam jars.

The funds for Medicare will still come from the same place, consolidated revenue, and that reflects our Constitution and how budgets are put together. Each year the government will sit down and look at the estimates of consolidated revenue coming in on the one hand and a list of expenditure going out on the other. Funding sources do not fundamentally matter in this equation—it is essentially incomings versus outgoings. Section 81 of the Constitution sets out that consolidated revenue is all of the taxes that the Commonwealth raises. This includes personal income tax, company tax, excise, the petroleum resource rent tax and the new major bank levy, which we have just debated and passed in this chamber.

On the expenditure side, we have many demand-driven programs like Medicare and the age pension, where, if you meet the specified criteria, the government will be able to appropriate money from consolidated revenue to pay for those services. Other government services, like the NDIS, are estimated and appropriated annually. A special account is just another way of appropriating these funds. Changing the appropriation source is relatively harmless, but it is worth pointing out that in this case these special accounts require the two ministers to calculate and credit sufficient amounts to be able to fund Medicare. Given the track record of those opposite—the robo-debt debacle and the census fail—you could be forgiven for being at least a little bit concerned about them having responsibility for paying our doctors and other transactions.

In relation to the NDIS, these broader points about special accounts are relevant not just to the meaningless and harmless Medicare fund but also to the NDIS. The difference is that the NDIS special account is a harmful political instrument. The government is using it to pretend that it is necessary for the future of the National Disability Insurance Scheme, to pretend that the NDIS is not fully funded and to excuse its harsh cuts, cuts that are not necessary because Labor fully funded the NDIS. Let me spell it out clearly for the benefit of those opposite: the costs of the NDIS are already built into the budget bottom line and have been since the 2013 budget. This government has reported those for the last four years, and the Productivity Commission has observed that the NDIS is on budget. There has been no blowout. Importantly, the Productivity Commission report says that, if implemented well, the NDIS will significantly improve the lives of people with a disability. Labor got the funding right, but it is now crucial that the government gets the rollout right. Those opposite only came up with this special account last year when they were looking for a new way to justify their harsh cuts. Not even the Commission of Audit of the former Prime Minister, Mr Abbott, or the Liberal's first budget in 2014, renowned for its cruelty, used the NDIS as a political tool like those opposite are now doing.

The 2013 budget set out the 10-year cost of the NDIS and the 10-year impact of the difficult but necessary decisions Labor used to fund the NDIS. These were not easy but, as a Labor government, we knew they were critical to the future of the NDIS. Savings included reforms to private health insurance of $6½ billion, reforms to superannuation of $6 billion and $20.6 billion from reforms to fringe benefits tax, reform to personal income-tax offsets, increasing the tobacco excise, reforms to import processing charges and, yes, increasing the Medicare levy. But, in our case, it was not accompanied by big unfair tax cuts for the highest income earners. These measures raised about $66 billion over 10 years, significantly more than the cost of the NDIS in the early years, and more than covered the cost of the NDIS in the year that the government claims it to be unfunded, 2018-19.

The increase in the Medicare levy was placed into a special account, the DisabilityCare Australia Fund, to provide visibility as the Commonwealth reimburses the states and territories. Just because our other measures were not put into a special account does not mean that they were not being used to fund the NDIS. We do not have special accounts for the age pension, child care, the Defence Force or the Treasurer's wage—and no doubt that is funded. Even the former Treasurer, Joe Hockey, understood that consolidated revenue was fungible when he introduced a tax receipt to show individuals where the proportion of their tax was being spent.

The government have looked at Labor's measures to fund the NDIS but they are not going into the special account; in fact, they ignore these completely in funding the NDIS. Instead, they use them to fund their own priorities, including part of their $65 billion tax handout to multinationals and the big banks, and they put at risk the NDIS.

The disability sector has raised its own concerns around a special account being established for the NDIS and the governance issues surrounding it. They include: undermining the shared responsibility arrangements between jurisdictions and the neutrality of the National Disability Insurance Agency structure; undermining funding stability, given it is tied to the budget cycle and political debate; and a lack of transparency and accountability. This government could choose to cut funding to the NDIS at any point by not crediting sufficient funds to the NDIS special account. And here is the kicker: when the parliament decides not to pass this government's harsh cuts, those opposite could use it to hold the NDIS hostage.

I will conclude my comments in light of the time, but these bills really are presentational. They are not worth the paper they are written on. You do not even need to look too closely at this legislation to know that. When it comes to Medicare, you cannot trust the Liberals and you cannot trust the Turnbull government. Only Labor can be trusted to fight for Medicare.