Tony Zappia (Makin, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Manufacturing) Share this | Hansard source

Perhaps the minister would care to answer some questions, given that she has not answered my colleagues questions so far. I presume she assumes that by putting them all off that will limit her time to speak and therefore she will not have to get to them. I ask the minister about her attempts to outsource and privatise our health system, many of which are contained in these bills.

The minister sleeps at night by telling herself the election turned on a text message. She does not want to admit that Australians were scared by her cuts and scared by her attempts to flog off our universal public health insurance scheme. But Australians know the truth, and so do to the doctors and GPs I speak to. On 2 July they voted to save Medicare. Minister, isn't it the case that you tried to privatise the Medicare payments system?

Unlike some of the minister's other policies, the rural health commissioner comes to mind. This was no thought bubble. The government spent years and at least $5 million on its secret plan to give Medicare to a bank or another corporation. The minister and the Prime Minister claim that they have changed their minds. They can say the plan never went to cabinet, while making relevant documents cabinet-in-confidence, but Australians are not fooled. As Bob Hawke so rightly put it: 'Everybody knows you do not set up a Medicare privatisation task force unless you aim to privatise Medicare.'

I now turn to the National Cancer Screening Register. Minister, isn't it the case that you outsourced the National Cancer Screening Register to Telstra? The national register is a good idea and Labor supported the bills to establish it, but the register will hold Australians' most sensitive data—like results of cervical and bowel cancer screenings—so who did you pick to operate the register? Was it the human services department, which runs the National Bowel Cancer Screening Register? Was it the Victorian Cytology Service, which has been operating cervical screening registers for almost 30 years? No. The minister picked Telstra and signed a $220 million contract, on the eve of the election, before parliament even saw the necessary legislation.

This is a telecommunications corporation with no experience in handling sensitive health data on this scale. As the Senate inquiry heard, this is the first time that a for-profit corporation will operate a cancer screening register anywhere in the world. The minister knows her contract stinks, because she cannot bring herself to mention the word Telstra in parliament. Today could be the first time, Minister.

I wish it ended there, Australians wished it ended there, but, Minister, isn't it the case that you put profits before patients time and time again? Today there are new reports that the minister has backed away from the reforming the prosthesis list. Just last month the minister said she would reform the list to:

… make private health insurance more affordable.

But the corporate giants who dominate the sector came knocking in the middle of the election campaign, and now we learn that cabinet has decided against reform this year. Imagine my surprise.

It is the same story as the minister's deal with Sonic, the multinational corporation that dominates pathology services. When the minister cut Medicare bulk-billing incentives for vital tests, patients reacted furiously: 600,000 Australians signed a petition against the cuts. So this minister did a desperate pre-election deal: Sonic accepted the abolition of its patients' bulk-billing payments in exchange for reregulation of pathology rents. We have not seen the draft regulations yet, but there is a very real chance they will hurt patients and GPs. Sonic profits again before pathology patients.

I could go on, because this is the minister who is watching on as her mates in New South Wales privatise public hospitals. This is the minister who still wants to privatise Australian Hearing—and we have not heard too much about that either. I am aware that there were discussions before the election about doing just that, but they seemed to go quiet in the lead-up to the election because clearly the minister knew that any thought of privatising Australian Hearing would not have gone down well before the election. And this is the minister who, with her mate Alan Tudge, is now running Medicare into the ground to justify another attempt at privatisation. But time is short, so I ask the minister: is there any part of our health system you will not outsource or privatise? Will there be a time when you put patients before profits?

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