Tony Abbott (Warringah, Liberal Party, Leader of the House) Share this | Hansard source

I do thank the member for Macquarie for his question and I appreciate that he is asking it on behalf of the 57,000 people in his electorate who benefit from the choice and security that private health insurance brings. Let me make it very clear that support for private health insurance is one of the signature policies of the Howard government. Thanks in large measure to the private health insurance rebate, the number of Australians covered by private health insurance has risen from six million to nine million, including more than one million Australians earning less than $20,000 a year. I can inform the House that in the September quarter an additional 82,000 people took out private health insurance. This is the fifth successive quarterly increase in private health insurance numbers, and in the last quarter that included 29,000 people aged under 25. These people can only afford private health insurance because of the Howard government’s private health insurance rebate, because without that rebate the average family’s premiums would increase by a thousand dollars a year.

We still do not know who the next shadow minister for health will be, but we do know that every single one of the frontbenchers opposite hates the private health insurance rebate and wants to rip the guts out of private health insurance.

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