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

I know how important this is to the member for Macquarie, because 75,000 people in his electorate have private health insurance, and they are relying on the Howard government to keep it affordable for them. Thanks to the policies of the Howard government, some nine million Australians now have the security and choice that come with private health cover. This is nearly three million more than under the Keating government, and it includes one million people earning less than $20,000 a year. All of these people have the potential to avoid state Labor’s public hospital waiting list.

Yesterday, the member for Gellibrand said that costs might rise under the government’s planned changes to health insurance legislation. Let me say that Labor are the past masters of premium increases. In 1987, premiums went up 19 per cent under Labor. In 1992, premiums went up 17 per cent under Labor. On average, under Labor, premiums increased by 11 per cent every year compared with just 5.6 per cent since 1996. Let us make it very clear: the member for Gellibrand is not trying to improve private health insurance; she is trying to sabotage it. She once told this parliament that the government should stop ‘pouring enormous amounts of money into private health insurance cover and instead put that money into public facilities’. We are in the mood, it seems, opposite, to repudiate statements, and I ask the member for Gellibrand: will she now repudiate that previous statement of hers? Indeed, I say to the Leader of the Opposition: on the subject of private health insurance, as on so many other topics, will the real Kevin Rudd please stand up? Does he still think, as he once told this parliament, that private health insurance is about the Americanisation of our health system? One day he was a mere staffer; the next day he is the de facto Premier of Queensland. One day he is the philosopher prince of Labor; the next minute, he reads comics for his inspiration.

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