Tim Wilson (Goldstein, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Small Business) Share this | Hansard source

I welcome the opportunity to offer a contribution on this legislation, because making sure we have access to affordable and viable health care is key to the sustainability of the country and to getting the maximum benefit from the human capital of our nation. It's also of critical importance to the Goldstein community. It has always been something I've taken a deep interest in, having a comparatively older population in the Goldstein community. Access to healthcare services has been of critical importance for people in getting the support and services they need at different stages of care. Last week we were in this chamber talking about access to all sorts of essential medicines to manage comorbidities and chronic conditions at later stages of life, but it's also important to make sure that people have access to the essential medical services they need and integrity in the health system.

That is why the state of health services in the great state of Victoria is such a challenge at the moment. We have a state government completely incapable of managing its budget; as a consequence, the decay and decline of health services through tertiary hospitals is a lived reality every single day. We do not want to see this at a national level through primary care services, but we know that, because the Albanese government can't contain or manage its budget spending, more and more Australians are looking directly at their credit card or wallet every time they go to the GP, just to be able to get by. They're told by their government that their Medicare card is all they need, but their lived reality is that they need extra co-payments just to get the support they need, despite what they voted for at the ballot box.

But it's more than that. More and more, we're seeing cons perpetrated against Australians, despite the claims of integrity being part of the health system. In 2017, when I was last a member in this chamber, we got an MRI Medicare licence for Cabrini Brighton. It was the first Medicare-funded licence for an MRI machine in the Goldstein electorate. I remember, when we secured it, many residents asked me the simple question of why it was secured for Cabrini Brighton rather than the local public hospital, Sandringham Hospital, part of the Alfred Health group. The answer was quite straightforward. It was that Sandringham Hospital didn't have an MRI machine. There is no point getting in an MRI licence funded by Medicare if you don't have an MRI machine to use it.

Funnily enough, it shocked me slightly at the start of 2025 when it was brought to my attention that Sandringham Hospital had, as part of the Alfred Health group, been granted an MRI licence. Don't get me wrong, I welcome an MRI licence. I think it is an enormously wonderful thing where there is an MRI machine. There's just one problem: Sandringham Hospital still doesn't have an MRI machine. The Albanese government, for some very obscure reason, issued MRI licences to three hospitals in Australia. Two were at hospitals that had MRI machines and one—which curiously happened to be in one electorate where they desperately wanted to make sure that the incumbent teal member of parliament was returned—didn't have an MRI machine. But it enabled that member of parliament to go around deceiving the community by claiming they had secured an MRI Medicare-funded licence, even though the hospital didn't have an MRI machine.

Have you ever seen the episode of Yes Minister, Deputy Speaker, about the idea of a hospital being built without any patients. It's kind of like having a hospital that has an MRI licence but no MRI machine. I have a simple and baseline expectation: since the minister for health has granted Sandringham Hospital an MRI licence, perhaps, as part of a system of integrity, the health minister could grant us an MRI machine so we could actually use it! If not, the expression 'gaslighting', which I seem to be using an awful lot when talking about at this government at the moment, justifiably comes to mind, because what we're seeing now is how our health system in the Goldstein community is being taken for a complete ride.

We've not just seen it on this issue. When I was on the board of Alfred Health, over a decade ago, we came to an agreement between Alfred Health group and the Royal Women's Hospital. The Royal Women's Hospital is of course an enormously important hospital, which had fundraising help from and was partly founded by Vida Goldstein, the woman whom Goldstein electorate is named after. As part of their maternity services, they built a partnership to make sure that maternity services were available to women in the south-east of Melbourne, through the Sandringham Hospital. That partnership ended only a couple of years ago, during the period in which I was not a member. I am not going to pass judgement. In the end, it's up to Sandringham Hospital, Alfred Health, the Royal Women's Hospital, and Monash Health to decide the pathway to best deliver maternity services. But what I see consistently is the talk of integrity and the reality of delivering integrity being completely discordant. There are MRI licences where there is no MRI machine and a loss of women's health services and delivery in the Goldstein community.

While we talk about this legislation, we've just heard from the member from Sturt about what's been happening in the context of vaping. One of the reasons that this country has a big problem with vaping right now is that this government has failed to do any proper regulation around vaping during its tenure and has actively shut down any pathway, including being practical participants in vaping regulation during the time when they weren't in government. Vaping has been a known problem for a long time now, but, because they have simply wanted to have a close their eyes and ears attitude towards discussing practical regulation, what they have done is let the criminals dictate the terms and regulation that sit behind vaping. You see this every day, at the moment. We've seen what's been happening in tobacco legislation, regulation and taxation, this obviously in the portfolio of small business, and has a direct impact of the health and wellbeing of the community.

Over summer I read a book about the prohibition movement in the United States in the early part of the 20th century. It's extraordinary how many times this government continues to repeat the errors of that period when it comes to tobacco regulation. It actively fuels criminal gangs and criminal behaviour through its policies. Of course, we're seeing that in terms of the impact it's now having on small businesses. You might as well have government ministers handing firebombs to criminal gangs and organised crime to destroy people's lives and livelihoods. That's how much the government are stoking the behaviour through different forms of taxation, which actively increase the premiums. Organised gangs then have an incentive to go and engage in criminal activity, and it's having a direct impact on small businesses across this nation.

This is the problem. We have a government that talk integrity but do not practise it in terms of operations—the people who are paying are small-business people on the ground in the Goldstein community—and they do it under the veneer of their boastfulness in talking about the government programs, but not in terms of what their building to improve the future of Australia. And Australians are suffering for it.

Speaking of integrity, we're also seeing this in areas like the National Disability Insurance Scheme; it's not just in areas around health. To give you a parallel—to show how large the problem around integrity and this government is now and to show how much people are struggling—we had a roundtable bringing together service providers in the health care and NDIS space. The attendees—Fiona White, Dr Shona Bischof, Stephanie Williams. Simone Emery, Lauren Gingold and Tarryn Dee—raised concerns specifically around NDIS pricing arrangements and, particularly, the three-weeks notice they were given for pricing adjustments in the lead-up to the 2025-26 financial year. We spoke about the adjustment of the measures that the government introduced as part of their pricing review and the human consequences of what happened when it went down the pathway of so-called integrity measures. What was the impact? They were reducing the volume of sessions they were having with clients. They were reducing their travel times and the amount of time they were prepared to directly engage in supporting people in need. There's been a decrease in the personalisation of the service, particularly for people who have acute conditions or who need additional support.

Of course, in addition to that, it's had a direct impact on those who are most marginalised. This is one of the biggest problems. You have people outside of urban communities or affluent communities. The further away you get, the more you cut travel times or reduce access to service providers. It's the people in the lower socioeconomic communities or the people who are further away, in rural and regional areas, who suffer. I think you would understand a bit of that, Deputy Speaker Chesters, considering the nature of your electorate. In the end, the impact is downstream and is greater because of the failure of early intervention, which pushes up costs in the long term which then drives up the cost to tertiary hospitals.

The most devastating thing—we've seen this with the NDIS providers and in other areas like healthcare services and social services—is that at no point has there been a focus by the government on a really critical part of service delivery: reducing red tape. We're not saying 'red tape' because we want to just get rid of regulation. We're talking about the needless burden that takes practitioners out of their core focus and effort of things like caring and supporting children. They're putting that energy into filling out paperwork. Of course there's a role for filling out certain components of forms for compliance—I'm not arguing against that—and we need to make sure that people are doing the right thing. But when a practitioner is telling us stories about how they spend more time filling out paperwork than in providing care, how they spend more time complying with the NDIA's regulation than in paediatric support for people with a disability, how they spend more time finding out how to keep their practice open than in getting to people with disadvantage—you start to think that maybe this government's priorities are more focused on how to build the bureaucracy rather than on how to build the benefit to Australians. It shouldn't surprise you. If you read the Daily Telegraph today, you'll see that union bosses' wages are increasing by 25 percent while construction workers' pay is going down by five per cent and you'll start to realise that this is just one giant cartel. It's trickle-up economics. It feeds the few at the expense of the many. Whether that's in construction, the NDIA or the services and healthcare sector—it doesn't seem to matter where their priorities or focus are—Australians are at the bottom of the pile.

It's our job to make sure that we hold this government to account and make sure that Australians have a voice and are stood up for. What's dispiriting is that there's such a dismissal and disinterest from the government when the consequences are so human. When we have a situation where we have a minister gaslighting the Goldstein community and who will issue Medicare licences for MRIs but then won't even provide an MRI machine, where they actively fuel organised crime and where they actively engage in interfering with and undermining the provision of healthcare services that desperately need integrity, you do have to start to question what this government's priorities are. You realise those priorities are itself, not the Australian people.

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