Thank you. This will leave many older Australians with a really difficult choice: to cut spending on other essentials, downgrade their cover or drop it altogether. If people drop private health insurance, it puts, of course, more pressure on the public system.

I want to touch on the modelling discrepancies that we've seen between the government's numbers and what we're hearing from industry and from other advocates. The government has been forced to admit that its cuts to the private health insurance rebate for older Australians will place financial pressure on about 1.2 million pensioners. On its own admission, the department still does not have a reliable up-to-date count, despite the health minister announcing the $11 billion tax grab in April. The government argues that these cuts will save money, but the government's own independent actuarial modelling suggests the opposite. It found that, while the Commonwealth could save around $482 million, the resulting increase in demand on public hospitals would cost governments around $547 million. In other words, we've got a situation here where taxpayers are going to end up paying more while patients are waiting longer. It's an absolute lose-lose. This is the worst of both worlds. We found out today from the Parliamentary Budget Office that $1.6 million of $3 million will be ripped from the pockets of pensioners. It's an outsized impact on those who are the most vulnerable in our community.

The country's biggest private health insurer has also disputed the government's own modelling. The government projects around 44,000 people will drop their cover, which isn't an insignificant number. That's half a Tasmanian electorate or maybe even more. This is a significant number of Australians who, just by the government's what I think is underdone modelling, will be impacted. But Medibank points to external modelling suggesting that the figure could be more than double that, up to 91,000. There were slightly more than 91,000 watching the NFL game at the MCG, but it wasn't much more. Imagine that number of Australians pouring into the public health system. What sort of impact would that have? I'll tell you what. It would completely flood the Redland Hospital, and I don't think the Townsville hospital would be very far behind, the member for Herbert!

We're hearing many other expert views on this as well. Medibank, HCF and Bupa have jointly warned that the change will fall hardest on poorer retirees and older Australians, particularly in our regional areas, and that a shrinking pool will push premiums higher for everyone else who remains. That point was made very articulately by some earlier speakers. More people dropping out of these insurance pools means extra pressure on everyone else, and, of course, that creates then a race to the bottom where people start withdrawing as it becomes more expensive, and we'll find ourselves with even greater expenses and even more pressure on the public system.

The Australian Medical Association says that it's unconvinced that the measure will deliver genuine net savings once the flow-on pressure to public hospitals is counted. I think that's an important point. I often make this point to stakeholders who meet with me on my mental health and disability portfolio: too often I think that the decisions made by Treasury, and potentially the Parliamentary Budget Office too, are based on the immediate impact that they're going to have on the federal government's bottom line. But what about the overall impact on taxpayers once this has been pushed onto the states, not to mention the ongoing costs that happen when you don't get that opportunity to get preventative investment?

National Seniors Australia has found that as many as 45 per cent of people whose sole source of income is the age pension hold private health insurance. National Seniors also warned that some older Australians could end up paying more than $1,000 extra each year to keep the level of cover that they already have. Now, I'm sure that what we're going to see is a lot of people who are able to scrape it together and just hold on to their cover. But, of course, what they're going to do is scale down that cover. They're going to move from higher levels down to lower levels and they're going to gamble that or make the judgement that that will cover them. Well, these are the years of life where most people will find themselves meeting the health system far more than they actually want to, and, when you make those sorts of savings decisions, they can ultimately cost you a lot more—cost the taxpayers a lot more—in the long run.

It's simply unfair for Labor to punish older Australians by reducing the private health insurance rebate. It's simply unfair. It doesn't make economic sense. It doesn't make sense from a health perspective. It might make sense to the Treasurer, but I don't think it makes much sense to the 23,000 Redlanders who are going to be affected. It certainly doesn't make sense to the health professionals within my electorate as well, who are concerned about it.

When people ask me about the government's rationale, I try to explain how they're justifying this. But ultimately I struggle because I think it is a very cynical move. It's a political calculation. That's what this is—the political calculation of 'we can take a little bit of the benefit that these Australians receive and we can take it away from them with a minimal political cost'. According to their political judgement, it means that they're not going to lose too many votes out of that cohort. Well, I can tell you that I think they are going to lose a lot of votes out of this. I think this is a classic misjudgement—a bit like 2019, perhaps, with some of those property tax changes. But I won't go there; I want to stay relevant. I see this as a very cynical political exercise. It doesn't make sense from a health perspective. It doesn't make sense from an economic perspective. It is purely a budget-saving measure that is very short term in its thinking.

I could go on. I've got a number of press statements here from various groups who are opposed to these changes. Private Healthcare Australia outlined that three million older Australians could face much higher health insurance costs under this proposal. It could cause up to 62,000 to drop their cover and another 200,000 to downgrade. Two federal electorates downgrading their cover—imagine the impact that's going to have on the public system. I could run you through Bupa's submission, which is chock-full of goodies just like that. They've made the point that it disproportionately impacts older Australians on low and fixed incomes. That's an important point.

The coalition supports choice. The coalition believes that, if people work hard to pay for private health insurance their entire working life, this should be encouraged and not punished. That's why we are going to fight to stop Labor's cuts to the private health insurance rebate. We are going to fight this every step of the way. The government should scrap this proposed cut. They need to scrap it and stop treating older Australians who've done the right thing for decades as its next revenue source.