Rebecca White (Lyons, Australian Labor Party, Assistant Minister for Women) | Hansard source

You should be here to be helpful. I'll take that interjection. You should be here working on behalf of all Australians, including older Australians, who expect you to come in here and be constructive. You should be coming in here and thinking about the ways that you can support good policy design and delivery, but instead you come in here and say you want to be oppositional and unhelpful. We have an obligation to be responsible and that is the way that we take our jobs and do it seriously. I would encourage you, through the Deputy Speaker, to encourage those opposite to do the same.

There are Australians who've raised this question with me, and I think it's really important to put some facts on the table. The $3 billion that the government will be able to realise through this change in policy will all go to investing in services for older Australians. It will mean more aged-care beds. It will mean more packages of care. That $3 billion is only going to be used to support older Australians to access the care that they need to deal with some of the challenges the honourable member raised in her contribution. She spoke about wait times. Well, I'll tell you what. They've come down under Labor. She spoke about problems that she's hearing in conversations with her constituents. It's a Labor government that took seriously the recommendations from the royal commission and invested record amounts of money into our aged-care system.

It is important to recognise where the money will be going, and it is also important to recognise what the independent modelling and the Treasury modelling tells us. The $11 billion figure that the shadow minister bandies around is very, very different to the independent analysis and the Treasury analysis, and I think older Australians should be comforted by the fact that what the fearmongering opposite is forecasting is, in fact, very different to what Treasury has provided advice to us about. Treasury advice shows that about 44,000 people may choose to exit private health insurance, which is a 0.4 per cent decline compared to current settings. That is very different from what those opposite are saying. The independent research, which was released last week, that I referenced has confirmed that the impact will be minimal. Researchers have said:

… this reform won't cause a mass exodus from private health insurance, and definitely won't overwhelm public hospitals as some states predict.

We want all Australians to have access to the health care that they deserve. We want our system to be fair and equitable. This is returning to the model that was designed and implemented under former prime minister John Howard, which means that if you take out private health insurance you receive a rebate. I think it's important to put that on the record too, because there's been a lot of scaremongering, where older Australians have heard that they will lose it entirely. That is not true. You will receive a rebate based on income, and for the majority of older Australians that'll be a rebate of about 24 per cent. That is important to note because I think a lot of people have been made to worry unnecessarily and have heard figures in the thousands of dollars that they are supposed to find to maintain their private health insurance, when in fact the Treasury modelling indicates it should be about $250 a year.

I recognise that for some families and for some older Australians that might be a lot of money, but that is also why we've invested in Medicare. We've made it free to see a GP, we've made medicines cheaper, we've invested in the Medicare urgent care clinic network, which provides more people with access to a health professional wherever they live and to not have to worry about the out-of-pocket expense. This has to be seen in the context of our investment in the broader health system. Seeing it in isolation ignores the investment that we are making in other ways and in other complementary parts of the healthcare system.

I recognise that there will be some people in our community who are worried about this and I want to reassure them that we continue to work very closely to make sure this is implemented in a way that is sympathetic. But I also call on the private health insurance industry to be responsible here. I have spoken directly with the private health insurance industry, I've heard their feedback and I ask them that, if they are worried about holding on to those loyal customers of theirs who've paid private health insurance for many years, then why don't they reward those customers by reducing the cost they pay annually?

One sure way to retain those older Australians in the private health insurance system and to reward their loyalty over many years of paying private health insurance payments would be for those private health insurance companies to offer them a discount. There is nothing stopping them from doing that. Rewarding loyalty would be a surefire way to retain their customers if they value them as much as they claim to, and I believe that they do. So I look forward to seeing how they might respond to that opportunity. The Labor Party and this government take our responsibility to all Australians of all ages incredibly seriously, and we are continuing to deliver a healthcare system that works for everyone.

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