Mark Butler (Hindmarsh, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Health and Aged Care) Share this | Hansard source

I thank my friend the member for Gilmore. She's such a fierce advocate for better health care in her beautiful community on the South Coast of New South Wales, which we all know has been through so much over the last 3½ years. She knows that, after nine years of cuts and neglect to Medicare by those opposite, it's never been harder to see a doctor than it is right now and it's never been more expensive. She's seen bulk-billing rates come down. She's seen gap fees rise in her community, as they have in all of our communities, which of course has been no accident, after nine long years of government by a Liberal Party that has such a long history of opposition to Medicare in general and to bulk-billing in particular. We remember John Howard describing bulk-billing as an absolute rort. We remember the Leader of the Opposition, in his first budget, trying to abolish bulk-billing altogether and make every single Australian pay a GP tax every time they visited a doctor. We remember that, when we were able to block that infamous GP tax in the other place, he started a six-year-long freeze to Medicare rebates that ripped billions of dollars out of general practice.

Well, we have a different approach on this side. We want to strengthen Medicare, not strangle it. Instead of freezing Medicare rebates, our budget two weeks ago delivered the biggest increase to indexation in more than 30 years, since Paul Keating was the Prime Minister.

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