Mark Butler (Hindmarsh, Australian Labor Party, Deputy Manager of Opposition Business in the House of Representatives) Share this | Hansard source

The most reliable truism of modern Australian politics over the last 50 years is this: the Liberal Party have never supported Medicare. They have never supported the concept of comprehensive, universal health insurance. They were at least very clear about that for decades, because, for decades, they tried to kill it. The godfather of the modern Liberal Party, John Howard, the former Prime Minister, was especially clear about this. He used phrase after phrase to reinforce the depth of his opposition not just to Medibank, and then to Medicare, but to the concept of universal health insurance in its broader sense. He described the Hawke government's achievement of introducing Medicare as a 'total disaster'. He said it was a 'nightmare'. He said Medicare was 'one of the great failures of the Hawke government'. Back in 1987, as the Leader of the Opposition, John Howard vowed that he would never stab Medicare in the back; he said he would 'stab it in the stomach'.

After the 1993 election, when the Liberal Party lost another election on the platform of abolishing Medicare, they finally hoisted the white flag against the total abolition of Medicare. But let's be clear: they have never embraced the idea of comprehensive universal health insurance. Instead, what they've done for the last 25 years is what John Howard promised never to do. They've spent 25 years stabbing Medicare in the back because they've not been able to abolish it. In their hearts and actions, their only concession to Medicare is as a safety net, not a system of comprehensive universal health insurance. Yet again, they're playing from the playbook of the Republican Party in the US, reluctantly agreeing to a safety net of government funded insurance for low-income households and pensioners but insisting that the middle class pay their own way. Under the rubric of freedom, they're insisting that the middle class pay not only the Medicare levy and their private health insurance but also, increasingly, gap fees.

This government has spent eight long years hacking away at the system of universal comprehensive health insurance, which is one of the shining jewels of Australian politics from the last five decades and one of the proudest legacies of the Labor Party. Memorably, their first attempt to hack away at it was the GP tax in the 2014 budget. They couldn't pass that, so instead they took it out on the doctors, who were, along with the Labor Party, one of the many groups that opposed the GP tax. They punished them directly, and indirectly punished patients, by freezing MBS rebates for years and years. Their budget papers made no secret of the fact that the four-year freeze on MBS rebates, which was introduced in 2014-15, was a direct result of their inability to pass a GP co-payment through the parliament. Four years later, after four years of freezing the indexation of MBS, the Treasurer, now the Prime Minister, added another two years to freeze the MBS rebates.

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