Nick Champion (Wakefield, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

It is great to be here and it is wonderful that the government backbenchers have stuck around to discuss Medicare. I know their great hero John Howard said in 1987 he wanted to 'stab Medicare in the stomach', and that is what this back bench wants to do. They want to gut Medicare. They want to get rid of Medicare. That is what you are doing. There is absolutely no doubt that the essential parts of the Medicare workforce are its nurses, who are an essential front-line part of this system, along with doctors and allied health professionals. They are the sorts of people we should be listening to. But what do you get from the government back bench? You do not get them listening. You get this defence of the government's budget—at least sometimes you do—by interjection. It is not by speeches, not by standing up in the parliament and putting themselves on the record; it is just by interjections and by showing up for these debates.

The AMA, the Australasian College for Emergency Medicine, the Doctors Reform Society, the Public Health Association, the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners, the Consumers Health Forum, the Australian Healthcare and Hospitals Association and countless others are against the government's changes. What are they against? They are against the GP tax, which will cost $7 every time you walk into a waiting room and every time you get a blood test. Think about it: $7 every time is a cascading and compounding tax on Australian families. Those opposite are out there giving their constituents the wrong impression by alleging there is some sort of safety net. We all know that safety net is not defined. We have seen neither hide nor hair of it. All we know is $7 every time you go to a waiting room, every time you get a blood test, every time you go anywhere near a doctor. That is the nature of this policy. That is why it smashes Medicare and it smashes preventative health care.

Dr Bruce Groves from Salisbury North, which is just outside my electorate, wrote to me. I used to go to his surgery. You might want to listen to this. This is not the Labor Party. He says:

To the honourable Nick Champion

Dear Sir

I wish to draw your attention to the massive reduction at my practice of patient numbers since the budget announcement re co-payments in general practice. Our practice of eight doctors, a noncorporate teaching practice, has noted a 30 per cent drop in attendance since this announcement. We are now trying to reassure patients that this measure will only come in if passed by both houses of parliament in July 2015. Patients are confused and upset. We, the doctors, working in a working class suburb with many pensioners and concession card holders are angry and appalled by the proposed co-payment measure, which may well destroy our practice and others in the region, given the response already. The measure is heartless, bereft of social conscience and punishes those who can least afford it.

None of you are listening to your electorates, none of you are listening to the AMA and none of you are listening to general practitioners in your electorates. It is a serious problem because every time someone does not go to the doctor it creates bigger problems down the track. We all know they end up in the emergency departments and they end up in our hospitals, and that will put more pressure on those nurses, more pressure on the front-line services and more pressure on our hospital system. There will be no savings. All of the mythical savings that will go into this wonderful research fund that the minister talks about will not appear because this is simply a cost-shifting situation. If you charge at the GP end, then you will make our hospitals less efficient in the long term.

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