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

I thank the member for Robertson for his question. We are so lucky to have this talented, young emergency physician as part of our government. We all deeply rely on his advice, particularly in relation to health care, because he campaigned so hard to deliver better health care to his community on the Central Coast.

Better than most people in this place, he understood the impact of nine years of cuts and neglect to Medicare. He was seeing it every single day at his workplace in the hospital. Billions of dollars cut from Medicare under those opposite had seen gap fees rise and bulk-billing rates decline. Indeed, some of the biggest drops in bulk-billing over recent years have been on the Central Coast and in the Hunter Valley in New South Wales.

That might not worry those opposite, because we remember that the father of the modern Liberal party, John Howard, described bulk-billing as an absolute rort. The Leader of the Opposition, in his first budget as health minister, tried to abolish bulk billing altogether.

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