Steven Ciobo (Moncrieff, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Youth and Sport) Share this | Hansard source

Well, I would dearly love to hear from Labor members who claim that that is wrong. I would love to hear them explain how that is wrong and attempt to justify to future generations of Australians that they have to pay off the debt that this government has left. I would dare say about the robustness than their arguments that, frankly, this piece of paper would have more strength.

What else have Labor said they will be able to do? What else have they promised the Australian people that they have absolutely failed to deliver on? We know that Australians are justifiably very concerned about the state of health. On the Gold Coast, Australia’s sixth largest and fastest-growing city, we have a number of unique pressures on the public health system. That is part of the reason the former coalition government put so much emphasis on driving people who could afford to pay into private health insurance through incentivisation. We knew that the more people there were in the private health system, the less pressure was placed on the public health system.

Unfortunately, our good work in the area has been undone. When in government, we lifted the level of private insurance coverage from the low 30s up to, in my electorate for example, the mid-50s. That meant that more people were using the private system because they were incentivised and they could afford to use the private system. But, because of Labor’s absolute ideological commitment to socialised health, we have now seen them slowly unpick at the edge of that. Kevin Rudd, prior to the last election, stood up and said that he promised not to touch private health insurance, but, as with so many of the promises of this Prime Minister, it meant nothing. One of their first acts in government was to start to erode the effectiveness of the private medical insurance scheme by playing around with thresholds. There are projections that this would force up to a million people who were privately insured onto the public system. That is Labor’s solution: to push people who were not a burden on the public system and who were actually utilising the private system back into public hospitals.

To compound the problem, the Labor Party said it would deal with this effectively through the rollout of what it called GP superclinics. Apart from the fact that the GP superclinic model has been lambasted by medical practitioners, we also know that in a city like the Gold Coast, Australia’s sixth largest city, not a single GP superclinic has been built or promised—not one. The Gold Coast is Australia’s sixth largest city, with a population of 500,000 people, and this government, which hails itself to be the greatest thing since sliced bread, has neither promised nor built a single GP superclinic there. The government has made the problem worse by taking people from the private system into the public system. Is it any wonder that Australians are scratching their heads about what exactly this Labor government is up to? It is not delivering services. It is, in fact, compounding problems. It is little wonder that the Gold Coast hospital is so frequently on bypass. It is little wonder that Gold Coast residents and residents in my electorate are forced to go up to Brisbane because of the incredible neglect of the public health system on the Gold Coast.

Another promise that was made by Rudd Labor ahead of the election was to end the double drop-off. How many times did we hear the Prime Minister and the Deputy Prime Minister talk about how Labor would end the double drop-off? They were going to create 260 childcare centres across the country that would enable working mums and fathers to make a single drop-off of their children at school and child care at the same time. Now, as with all the other false and hollow promises of Rudd and of Rudd Labor, this has also been axed. This was yet another promise where, suddenly, apparently the market radically transformed itself in two years, so now they no longer need to build these childcare centres.

The truth is that the Rudd Labor government would say anything to get elected and then just junk it after the election. That is what has happened. But we were warned. The current Minister for Environment Protection, Heritage and the Arts, the member for Kingsford Smith, said—and was in fact quoted by a radio announcer ahead of the last election when he made a remark in one of the airport lounges—that it did not really matter what Labor said, because they would just change everything once they got elected. Now we see the absolute truth of that statement.

So it is little wonder, then, when it comes to Labor’s performance, that this Prime Minister says he is an economic conservative, but then writes extensively boring essays on neoliberalism, runs up $41 billion of debt in this budget alone and has $95 billion of net debt forecast for this country. It is little wonder when he promises a computer for every child from grade 9 to grade 12 but then only delivers, in my own electorate for example, 16 per cent of those computers. This is a Prime Minister who promises the Australian people that he will not touch private medical insurance but then seeks to unpick it and pull it apart; a Prime Minister who promises that he will be strong on border protection but then does everything he can to completely dilute and water down our border protection policies; a Prime Minister who says that he knows and understands small business but then creates incentives which are totally ineffectual because they rely on small business cash flow; a Prime Minister who says that he understands the needs of older Australians who are self-funded retirees but then proposes an obscene 40 per cent extra tax on the industry that has helped to make this country strong and the economic powerhouse that it is; and a Prime Minister who erodes the retirement savings of older Australians, both those who hold shares in mining companies and, through his threatened exploitation of Telstra’s provision of copper cable, those who hold shares in Telstra.

On each of these fronts, is it any wonder that Australians have lost faith, confidence and trust in our Prime Minister? The track record of this Labor government is appalling. Australians can see straight through this Prime Minister and straight through this Labor government. It is best summed up in a comment that was made by one of my colleagues. He said that Kevin Rudd is just like Gough Whitlam but lacking the conviction.

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