Andrew Wallace (Fisher, Liberal National Party) | Hansard source

To hear those members opposite in 2026 constantly bang on about 'Mediscare' campaigns is really getting just a little bit beyond the pale. They tried it in all of the last few elections. I don't know how many times I have to say this—in the words of the Prime Minister: 'How many times do I have to say this? Fifty times?'—this coalition is committed to Medicare. I am committed to Medicare. The last thing I want to see, as someone who has had two very, very dangerously life-threatening illnesses befall two of my four kids, is a US-style health system in this country. The coalition is absolutely committed to ensuring that it doesn't matter where you live, what your postcode is or what your income is—if you are an Australian citizen or permanent resident, you should be able to get access to Medicare and be treated for whatever illness or injury you have by world-leading doctors and hospitals. I don't know how many times I have to say that, because those Labor members opposite just seem to think, 'We'll rattle out this old Medicare trope.' It's BS, and it should be treated as such and called out for what it is. Anyway, I digress.

Let me be clear on this bill, the Health Legislation Amendment (Improving Choice and Transparency for Private Health Consumers) Bill 2026. The coalition supports the intent behind the bill. We support greater transparency in healthcare pricing. We support protecting consumers from unfair premium increases. We support giving Australians the information they need to make informed decisions about their health care. Nobody on this side of the chamber disputes those objectives. But supporting an objective and waving through legislation that is not ready to deliver that objective are two very different things, and this bill, despite being announced more than a year ago, is still not ready.

Approximately 15 million Australians hold private health cover. The private health system does not operate in isolation from our public hospitals, particularly in rural and regional Australia; it works alongside them. When the private system is strong, it relieves pressure on public hospitals. When Australians drop or downgrade their cover, they shift onto public waiting lists already under severe strain. We're already seeing record levels of ambulance ramping and increasing waiting times at hospitals across this country. Any reform in this space carries real consequences, and those consequences must be weighed very carefully.

As a result of what this government did in the budget, more than 8,000 Australians have signed my petition opposing Labor's decision to strip private health insurance rebates from older Australians, and each and every one of these people deserves to be taken seriously. You're probably too young to remember this, Madam Deputy Speaker Garland. When I was a young lad, I remember sitting across the kitchen table from my wife. John Howard was talking about how you needed to sign up to private health insurance before you turned 30. If you didn't, then, if you wanted to come into the private health insurance system later, you were going to pay a premium. But if you signed up before you turned 30, you'd get concessional rates for the rest of your life, provided you kept doing it.

This government is now ripping that away from people aged 65 and over. That is exactly true. At a cost of $1,600 for a couple on the gold rate, that is absolutely true. You can try to pull the wool over people's eyes, as this government tries to do all the time. The misinformation, the mistruths, the dishonesty coming from that side of the House on everything in relation to this budget just beggars belief.

Australians will need private health insurance the most when they are aged over 65. That's when they need medical assistance the most. Now this government has changed the rules on them. They've ripped that rug from underneath them, and they are angry. My electorate is an older electorate. They still call me 'the young fella', so it must be an older electorate. They are angry. They feel like they have been misled. This commitment that was provided to Australians was provided by multiple governments of all varying colours, but this government is the first to breach that trust, and I've got to tell you that those pitchforks are being sharpened by the 65-and-overs. They cannot wait for the opportunity for this election to come around.

But I digress. This is exactly why the coalition supported referring this bill to the Senate Standing Committee on Community Affairs for greater scrutiny. The inquiry confirmed what we suspected: key operational details remain unresolved and the department was either unable to answer some of the bill's most fundamental questions or had not yet considered their responses. That matters because changes to the way private health insurance products are approved and changes to how specialist fees are published affect the decisions of real people and how they go about making their healthcare decisions every single day. When legislation is poorly designed, real people bear the consequences.

Schedule 1 of this bill deals with transparency by default. The bill would allow the Department of Health, Disability and Ageing to publish individual specialist fee data on the Medical Costs Finder website, drawing on Medicare hospital insurance billing data already held by government. The coalition established the Medical Costs Finder website. We believe transparency in medical pricing is worthwhile and necessary. Australians deserve to know what they are likely to pay before they walk into a specialist's room.

But the volume of data involved here is significant and the risk of errors is a real concern. Speaking of doctors, a clinician's fees, published incorrectly on a government website, can cause immediate and potentially lasting reputational damage. Despite the government announcing these changes more than a year ago, the Senate committee received no satisfactory answers to several fundamental questions: How dated will the information on the website be at the time of publication? How regularly will it be updated? Will clinicians be able to upload and amend their own fee information to ensure accuracy? What will the error correction process look like in practice, and will this have a quick turnaround or will it be a typically glacial response at the expense of the clinician—someone just like you, Mr Deputy Speaker Freelander?

What makes this more troubling is a provision buried in this legislation that grants the department immunity from civil liability for loss, damage or injury arising from the publication of medical fees. You heard that right. The government is holding individual clinicians to strict compliance obligations while exempting itself from equivalent accountability when things go wrong. It is entirely appropriate that one of the country's leading paediatricians happens to be in the chair right now. Mr Deputy Speaker, this government is going to hold you and your colleagues to a different standard from the one to which it holds itself. That may cause you some consternation and may cause you to rethink my suggestion to you: that you might best serve your community by going back and being a great paediatrician. But I'll continue.

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