Bruce Billson (Dunkley, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Sustainable Development and Cities) Share this | Hansard source

Who knows whether they will get a laptop at school. Just being well enough to learn as well as they can at school was their first hope. They recognised that what the opposition was advocating would deliver that. They then heard the echo from the Labor Party sometime afterwards and then found, sadly, from these figures provided to the Senate estimates committee that it was a hollow echo. It in no way matched the leadership that the Liberal and National parties were offering.

What has happened now is—in a belated recognition that private health matters, that the public system has pressures and demands and plays a crucial role—we are now turning back to the private sector. We are now saying to the private sector through private health insurance, ‘Will you provide these devices? We will list these devices. Yes, we have just planned to introduce rules that prostheses need to be medically implanted, but an insulin pump is not medically implanted, therefore—gee—we had better put another listing together.’ Thankfully that listing will at least see the private health community fill this void—this void between expectation and political spin and delivery—that the Rudd Labor government has created.

So here today we are debating a bill to allow the private health insurance sector to do what the Rudd Labor government promised it would do and has not. There are so many points you could make out of that. The totemic example of how this Rudd Labor government—this federal Labor party—governs for the country is captured through this. The example of people who promise so much and deliver so little is captured through this. There has probably been more money spent promoting the program than has been delivered—more effort gone into the press release than in the execution of the support for families that desperately need it. And then, at the end of the day, all is well and there is only wisdom in Canberra! That seems to be the prevailing attitude of the current government. Now there is a recognition that the private sector has a role to play—belatedly—and the private sector will have to mop up this underperformance of the Rudd Labor government.

In my own community of Dunkley, there are about 878 people living with type 1 diabetes. The number registered with type 1 diabetes across Australia at 30 September 2006 was 122,000 plus. This has an enormous impact on young people. The rate at which type 1 diabetes is emerging in our younger population is very concerning, and the community that I represent has not been excluded from it. It has been the focus of local media coverage as those statistics about condition prevalence have come to attention. Diabetes Australia have done a remarkable job of highlighting how important this is to the local community.

The Liberal and National parties understood that, acted, provided leadership, made an election commitment and carried that through after the election. The Liberal and National parties understood what was going on and educated the Rudd Labor government. The Rudd Labor government picked up the topic and made the statements but has not delivered. So this—a belated recognition that the private health insurance industry matters in our private-public community health model in Australia—is something that we should welcome. It again makes you wonder why the Rudd Labor government is undermining private health with its changes in the subsidy for private health insurance incentives, why it is again looking to private health to perform where the Rudd Labor government could not but at the same time making it harder for the private health industry to do more, as incentives and encouragement are wound back by Canberra.

It is just another example where health policy seems to be very disconnected. I highlighted that there is concurrently a review about this very subject while we are debating the topic in the House. Here is an example of private health being asked to do more when it is actually being made less attractive for people and the private health industry is being put under pressure by this government. The Labor government is saying: ‘Do more, private health industry. We’re going to make it harder for you, but we’re going to expect you to do more.’ That is what this bill is about.

It is like the medicentre in my electorate, where the 12,000 to 14,000 category 4 and 5 attendees at the accident and emergency department at the Frankston Hospital have an option. They can go to a medicentre, an after-hours GP clinic. The Rudd Labor government is going to halve the funding for that program, a program that has been going for decades with the collaboration and support of GPs, who have been able to stay in their practices knowing they do not have to get up, possibly every night, in the middle of the night to attend to their patients because there is a collaborative after-hours service available. It has kept GPs in the practice of being doctors. It has supported the health services in our area. And now, for all of that good work, it is going to have its funding halved. All that will do, potentially, is send a large chunk of those 12,000 to 14,000 category 4 and 5 patients back into the emergency department—the emergency department that is under such pressure. Rather than increase the resources, the state Labor government has increased the size of the waiting room.

What is going on here? The collaboration that is needed in health policy is missing. It is evident in this, and we see it in so many areas. We are not opposing the bill, but there is a lot of work to be done to make it work. (Time expired)

See this speech in context