Ed Husic (Chifley, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary to the Shadow Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

We saw today an extraordinary dummy spit. We had the Treasurer of this country come in here and basically threaten a whole swathe of Australian society that, because he could not get his cuts through, he was going to find other ways to hurt ordinary Australians. Whenever he is under pressure you can tell the Treasurer is feeling it because basically he comes in and does a sook. He will either do it on AM radio or he will do it on the floor of the House.

He is uptight about problems of his own making. The coalition have got themselves to this point. Three quotes demonstrate the problems they have got themselves into. One, they went into an election saying they would not raise taxes, they would not cut any spending other than what they have announced and they would still get to surplus. Magic—supreme sorcery, if you will—that they would be able to get to that point in that way. Two, the Prime Minister expressed that there would be no cuts to health, no cuts to education, no changes to pension, no changes to GST and no cuts to ABC or SBS. The Prime Minister said this on a number of occasions—it was not just a one-off; he said it a number of times. The third quote that has got them into all sorts of trouble is from nearly a year ago. At a doorstop the Prime Minister was asked by the media a specific question:

… the condition of the budget will not be an excuse for breaking promises?

The then opposition leader, now Prime Minister, said:

Exactly right.

They have gone into an election trying to be all things to all people and then come through and devised a budget that has hurt people across the country. When the parliament has said: 'No. We're holding you to account. You made these commitments'—the ones I just read out—'and we're holding you to them,' we then have the spectacle of our nation's Treasurer coming in on the floor of the parliament today and carrying out one of the biggest dummy spits we have seen in a long time.

They got themselves into this hole, but the problem is they want ordinary Australians to pay for it. If you want any clearer example of the type of pain they want to inflict on people, look at what they are doing in health. Look at what they are doing with this bill, which is nothing more than a $1.3 billion tax slug on ordinary Australians, in the context of everything they are doing in health.

This is not a plan to manage health care into the future; it is a plan to do two things. One is clearly to savage expenditure. They clearly just want to take a blunt stick and beat that expenditure down. The second is one that we need to put more and more of a spotlight on: a radical reshaping of the federation.

The longer term game plan is that the government will vacate from what the Commonwealth is doing now. In the future, it will force all the obligations onto the states and territories and it will not be there in terms of trying to provide a national response. We will have, at least on key policy areas like health, a uniform standard. Regardless of where you live in this country, the excuse that because you live in a rural and regional area you should get a second-rate health scheme and that the only way to get better health outcomes is move to the city is, frankly, unacceptable in this day and age.

There is no healthcare plan behind what they are doing. There are two big things that are going to impact on health. One is the ageing of the population, as has been well documented by former Treasurer Costello and through the Intergenerational report. The fact of the matter is that that will always put more pressure on healthcare budgets across the country, regardless of government. The second is lifestyle issues, and we see that in our community all the time. We have conditions that are triggered by the way we live in terms of how much we exercise, how much we eat and what that does to our longer term health. There is a reason for this. If you look at most prosperous nations you will see higher levels of obesity and diabetes. In my area, the other concern is heart disease. There are also the things that come through indulging in excessive alcohol, smoking and tobacco consumption.

These things will have a longer term impact. They cannot be dealt with overnight. We have been trying to get people to consider the need to invest in things like preventative health care rather than think they can pop a pill and that is going to sort them out. Let us look at the way that the government has addressed health care in this budget. It has done two things. As I have said previously, we have a health minister who thinks his biggest job is to stop people from going to the doctor. But this bill will stop people from not only going to the doctor but also buying medicine. That may seem to those in the gallery like a rather extreme statement, but I say that because we have already had studies that have looked at the consumer behaviour, the behaviour of the general public, if you increase the price of medicines.

The COAG Reform Council report that was released in early June looked at this. It said that 8.5 per cent of people in 2012-13 delayed or did not fill their prescription due to cost. For disadvantaged areas, some of which I represent in this place, the figure is 12.4 per cent, and for Indigenous people it is 36.4 per cent. That is recent evidence. Is this a one-off? The answer is no. When you look at the evidence over a longer period of time, you see a replication of the type of experience that I just outlined. For example, the last time the coalition were in power they increased the tax on medicines. When they did this in 2005, the prescriptions for some essential medicines fell by as much as 11 per cent. So you can clearly see that, if you increase the price of medicines, people act in a certain way.

As I said, the answer is not to stop people from going to the doctor and to stop them taking their medicines, it is to find a way to stop them having to go to the doctor and having to get medicines. The way to do it is to encourage people to see their GP sooner and to determine what preventative mechanisms can be put in place. The doctors in the electorate I represent tell me all the time about the types of things that they are doing to address the top three issues that, in their mind, they need to attend to: obesity, diabetes and heart disease. You can rope all those three lifestyle related conditions into one. Some are obviously genetic—your DNA will play havoc sometimes and you might get heart disease quicker than others—but, generally speaking, there are other things that you could do differently to avoid or minimise risk. Being able to go to a GP and have a GP put a preventative healthcare plan in place for you and to attend to those issues quicker will help us longer term.

Obviously, with the ageing of the population, you cannot avoid that demographic wave—that is going to hit no matter what—but there are things that you can do in your middle years or even earlier that can prevent a greater variation in the impact in your later years. Being able to see a doctor sooner makes a difference. What has the response of this government been? To try and stop you from seeing a doctor sooner by putting in this co-payment, this GP tax, as we call it. They claim that the money they are going to raise from that will be put into a medical research fund, which I think is a disgraceful move, frankly. I will never be convinced of the value or the merit of this move because all it does is slug the sick of today to pay for the sick of tomorrow. It is completely unacceptable. They are going down that path.

I and other colleagues in the chamber have already reflected on the experience in our electorates where medical clinics are sending out SMSs encouraging people to see the doctor, because people are thinking that this GP tax, this $7 co-payment, has taken effect when, in reality, it will take effect from July next year. They have experienced such a contraction in presentations to clinics that it has caused them great alarm. Those on the other side of the House may think it is great that people are not turning up to a doctor, but people are potentially putting off taking action on the types of preventable conditions that could be dealt with today and shifting the load of that down the track to other generations to pay for. This is particularly the case with men. Men are notorious for not going to see a doctor about any condition that they have and, as a result, it costs them a lot more in terms of their personal wellbeing and in terms of their finances to fix that condition. So the key is to get people to see the doctor sooner, to avoid unnecessarily using medication and to find a way to sidestep the personal and financial cost.

I come back to the point that the government have not been able to demonstrate a rationale from a health perspective about what they are doing. It is a cruel and crude financial response, and it will see us paying more down the track to correct this. As a result, not only at an individual level but also at the state level, these are the types of things they are doing—the type of cuts they are making: $50 billion in cuts to states and territories for health care. The argument from the Prime Minister and others who appear in the House during question time is to say: 'Oh no, health budgets! We are actually increasing spending; it goes up every year,' and they show it. They are increasing health spending at a rate phenomenally lower than was expected by the states and territories. It is so low. If the states and territories were on board with this, why would we have the Premier of New South Wales describe the $50 billion cuts—or the $80 billion cuts, if you include schools—as a 'kick in the guts'? They do not see it. They are not championing an increase in healthcare spending because they know what they were expecting was up here, and what they are now getting is way below—down here. It might be increasing but it is increasing at a rate that is insufficient to deal with the costs they know are coming.

In this parliament, in 2011-12, we dealt with legislation that was part of an overall package of support for states and territories dealing with health care. The concern was that, by 2046, one component of state and territory budgets would overwhelm all others and that would be health care. If we did not find a new way to finance health care in this country, states would spend their entire budget on hospitals and health care. That is why we put the deals in place. This was through COAG. It did not matter what political party, Labor or Liberal, they agreed through COAG; the federal, state and local governments agreed this was the way to go. The only people who opposed it were the coalition at the federal level. Why? Because their political interests were not served by finding a solution. That is what we had there.

Now we have this combination, this melting pot, of issues. We have the GP tax; a $1.3 billion slug through lifting the cost of medicines; and this massive cut to hospital and health care. Does anyone in this place think that this is sustainable—that, through this budget, Australians will not pay the price? Does anyone think we will not pay the price down the track for this? It is abominable to think of what we are doing to future generations' health care, as a result of this first budget alone. We will put people through greater suffering and greater pain, and I mean those terms literally, because of what this government is doing to health care when they promised people—when the Prime Minister on repeated occasions said—'No cuts to health.'

I am not just talking about the cuts they have made in the budget. The Australian people had every reason to believe that when it came to health care, based on what they heard from the Prime Minister, he would not conduct the type of vicious attack we are seeing right now on health care. They were entitled to think that, because he was out there—the champion against the cost of living, 'Captain Fluoro'. Everywhere you saw him he was in a fluoro vest, visiting factories and workplaces and saying he was going to attack the cost of living.

But he never, ever told people that when he got in he would cut hospital funding by $50 billion, that he would introduce this co-payment and that he would lift the cost of medicine. Nowhere did he say that and, as a result, we have this bill before us now. It comes as a shock. It will lift the price of medicines and reduce the safety net, particularly for the most vulnerable. We see this, and all the other things, and we will pay a long-term price for these short-term decisions.

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