Steve Georganas (Hindmarsh, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Minister for Health. What is the government doing to ensure that health funding delivers the best possible outcomes for Australians?

Tanya Plibersek (Sydney, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Health) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Hindmarsh for that question. For most Australians, nothing is more important than the health and wellbeing of our families. In the event of illness, people want access to the most appropriate care where they need it and when they need it. That is why, after inheriting a system that the Leader of the Opposition had cut by a billion dollars and inheriting shortages of doctors and shortages of nurses, we are training 1,000 extra nurses a year and 6,000 extra doctors over 10 years and we are putting new investments into cutting waiting times and cutting the length of emergency department waits as well. We are making sure that people can get GP care where they need it and when they need it.

We are able to make these investments by carefully considering where every dollar goes. That is why we are introducing the means test on private health insurance. This is a means test which will not affect 20 million Australians. It will affect no-one who earns under $83,000 a year—not a dollar lost if you earn less than $83,000 a year. As your pay increases the subsidy decreases, but you have to be, as a family, earning a quarter of a million dollars a year before you lose the subsidy entirely. These modest changes will save $2.4 billion over the next three years. That is a whole year's pay for 13,000 extra doctors or 26,500 extra nurses. Why are we doing this? We are doing this because we do not want a situation where the people who sit on this front bench or that front bench have their private health insurance subsidised by the people who clean this chamber at night.

As health minister, every day I hear about the needs in our health system. I hear about the diagnostic imaging which is needed in one community, I hear about the GP shortage in another community and I hear about the brilliant new medicines which are being discovered all the time by our medical researchers. I know that people on this side of the chamber want to fund those new investments. They want to see that better health care.

But to do that we need to spend every dollar well. Yes, we do want to do better on dental care. We have made huge improvements in dental care, with 1½ million checkups for teenagers, with 220 new dental chairs and with projects like the $2.1 million 10-chair teaching clinic at Adelaide Dental Hospital, which serves the constituents of Adelaide, including those in the member for Hindmarsh's electorate. He has been a huge advocate for better dental care. But to do those things, we need measures like the means testing of private health insurance. (Time expired)