Tim Wilson (Goldstein, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

It's a privilege to be able to speak in support of the Private Health Insurance Legislation Amendment (Age of Dependants) Bill 2021. The reason I speak in support of this bill is because it is such a simple but critically important measure in understanding the slipstream of young Australians' lives and the relationship and the bond that we have to each other. Many young Australians, logically, will be raised under the protection of their parents' private health insurance, they will finish school, go on to tertiary education or some other form of skills or trade or apprenticeship, and they will continue to be covered by their parents' private health insurance. Of course, once they hit the age of 21 or cease to study, they will then lapse out of the system, exactly when we need them to be taking responsibility for their health care as part of a holistic healthcare protection of themselves over their whole lives. Many young people only re-opt in to the system when they find there's a financial penalty if they choose not to around the age of 30.

This legislation is bridging that divide, that gap, where young Australians who either continue to study, or whose parents are happy to support and assist them in the coverage of their private health insurance as dependants, can walk the bridge to the age of 30 and be able to pay for it themselves. I say that as the member for an electorate which has one of the highest concentrations of private health insurance in the country, where almost everybody, young or old, has some form of private health coverage. In fact, it was once was pointed out to me by the private health insurance industry that there are more private health insurance policies in my electorate than constituents, which shows you how much the people of Goldstein value their private health insurance. I suspect that's partly because there are non-citizens who have private health insurance as well. Many of those young people in the Goldstein community, from Bayside and Glen Eira, will go through their secondary education covered by their parents' private health insurance, they'll go off and live somewhere more proximate to tertiary education and, at that time, while they're there, they'll have coverage until they go into the workforce. While they are starting out with other competing pressures, as the previous speaker said, private health insurance might be the first thing on the chopping block because at that age of 21 or 22, all the way through to your mid-20s—I'm 41 and I still think I'm invincible—you're generally are less concerned about your healthcare unless you have a pre-existing condition. This legislation will help those young Australians bridge that divide so they can continue to be covered by private health insurance. If they need assistance and care at that time, they will be able to get it through the benefits of their parents, who continue to recognise them as dependants for this purpose.

But the previous speaker made a critical point. If you've got private health insurance and you have a pre-existing condition, particularly if you are young, even as you are going into adulthood, you may need to continue to get that support and that service. So, for young people with a disability who may need extra assistance, we are here and we are backing them. If you have another condition, which may have occurred in your youth and continues through to your adolescence and young adulthood, you will continue to get the support from your parents' private health insurance, because the Morrison government is backing you in being able to access the services that you need.

More critically, it will help the sustainability of the private health system for every Australian. Most young Australians contribute to private health insurance and don't need to draw much down on it until they get older. Of course, older Australians tend to need to draw down on it more. They've invested in their health insurance at a younger point in their lives, when they know there's a lower profile of risk, and carry that all the way through to the latter stage of their life, where they know there's a higher degree of risk. That journey is not dissimilar for the overwhelming number of Australians who are dependent on private health insurance. So this helps us in not just supporting young Australians today but supporting young Australians as they reach the age where they have children themselves, or get married, and have dependants. And, of course, it helps ensure there is sustainable private health insurance in the latter arc of their life, where they can continue to rely on a system that's affordable and accessible.

The previous speaker actually did raise a legitimate issue, the economic challenges facing young Australians, which led me then to wonder whether, between the early ages of 20 to 30, private health insurance is at the top of young Australians' priority lists. Of course, this is because young Australians face challenges, particularly economic challenges, because of employment arrangements and needing to pay rent while they are concurrently trying to save to buy their first home. But, conveniently, the previous speaker forgot one factor, which is the compulsion of having 10 per cent of their wage taken from them and locked up into a fund controlled by—in many cases—those on the other side of the chamber and their allies. Of course, the more money that's locked away from them, the more of their savings that are taken away from them, the more it impacts on their wages today. It also means they can't save for the biggest and most important financial decision in their life, homeownership. That is because, by law, we have engaged in a form of economic social engineering where we have prioritised superannuation and the savings for your second most important financial decision ahead of your first. Whenever you hear the crocodile tears from Labor members who talk about how young Australians are finding it harder to buy a home, it is laced with hypocrisy, because Labor want more of the savings of young Australians to be taken away from them—whether it's to pay for their private health insurance or to be able to save to buy their own home—to build up the nest eggs from which their friends then profit through fees and bonuses. And they won't even report to this parliament what they're getting up to, even though they demand more of working Australians' hard earned cash. Of course, it does come at an expense. It comes at the expense of homeownership.

And the hypocrisy doesn't just end there with their claims of concern for young Australians trying to buy their own homes when their money is locked up in superannuation. The hypocrisy extends further. The member for Macnamara this week wrote a paper about how young Australians' superannuation savings should be spent on building projects for houses that super funds own and that young Australians can then rent, to become serfs to their own super. This is the most despicable shift in economic power in this country's history, where we are seeing the concentration of economic power—

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