Andrew Laming (Bowman, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Regional Health Services and Indigenous Health) Share this | Hansard source

I second the amendment. This fairer private health insurance legislation is a direct attack on Australia—it is not just an attack on those who have PHI; it is an attack on the dual health system that Australia is so proud of. The Labor government perennially hate people who have private health, and now they are having their third attempt to make it even tougher to keep private health insurance. Families that have PHI at the moment—and the average person with PHI in this country earns around $47,000—are within a few hundred dollars of Australians who do not hold private health insurance. That comes from an ATO one per cent sample that we have been able to analyse. The net income difference between those who hold insurance and those who do not is about $12 a week. Those who have insurance actually pay out of their own pockets $1,300 for their private health insurance, so we should never forget that these people make themselves poorer by paying today for the hospitals we need in the future. Older Australians who may be joining private health late in life need to know there will be services available when they need them.

We should never fool ourselves that any money ripped out of the private health system, or any money that is clawed out of this rebate, will ever trickle its way back to public hospitals run by the state governments. There is no better example of that than the stimulus package of 2008-09. I ask this chamber to remember how much of that money was spent on health care when it really mattered. We had a Prime Minister promising us that the buck stopped with him, but how much of the stimulus money was directed into health infrastructure? Not a cent of that money went into health infrastructure. So why should Australia believe today that any of these savings will trickle back to hospitals?

It is quite clear that the second great proposition put by this government is that millionaires do not need their PHI paid for by the rest of Australia. But, as was just articulately put, Australians at all levels pay for the Medicare rebates of people of all incomes, for the PBS services of all Australians, for the childcare rebates of all Australians and for Australians, rich or poor, to go to public schools. We do not charge high-income earners more to send their children to university. No, we are a nation proud of our universal health and education system. We are a nation that is proud that we do not attack people because of their income when they need to access social services.

If one truly hates high-income earners then attack them through the tax system. That is the way to beat down high-income earners—attack them through the tax system, if one wants to be that courageous. But, no, we cannot do that. Instead, we are going to attack them through their access to the two great pillars of our social services that we are so proud of: health and education. We were once a proud nation that made health services available to everyone, but that will no longer be the case with this legislation.

Everyone can quote studies from all sorts of different sources about who will pull out and who will downgrade. But we know one thing: with elasticity of demand, when you make something more expensive people are more likely to pull out. We know when the cost of living is as high as it is today that that effect will be acute. I do not care which study is quoted, whether it is one by Deloitte, Booz & Co. or any other provider of this information, this is a government that downgrades. The Australian people aspire to upgrade, to save hard and pay for the future and pay for health care. This government are making it harder and harder to do that.

The figure around for the number of Australians who will be directly affected by these changes is 1.5 million. What would a rational actor do? They will sit around a table and, faced with skyrocketing costs of living, say, 'If we can downgrade just a little, we can actually get ourselves a 10 per cent saving and make up for the 10 per cent increase in our rebate.' That is utterly rational. Let me take that to the next level. What would families in rural and remote Australia do, where the value proposition for private health is probably the lowest because there are fewer private providers out there? They will say: 'Let's drop 10 per cent of our cover. Let's make an exclusion and save ourselves the 10 per cent that Julia Gillard is laying on to our cost of living.'

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