Michael Forshaw (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

It was a rock solid, ironclad promise—thank you, Senator O’Brien. They told us there were weapons of mass destruction and so on. You just cannot believe this government on most issues.

Not only the AMA is opposed to this government’s proposed sale, even Mr Russell Schneider from the Australian Health Insurance Association, who represents the private health insurance funds other than Medibank Private, has raised concerns. He just does not accept this government’s view that the sale will be good for the private health insurance sector. He said:

Health funds need to be concerned for the well-being of their members, not their shareholders.

As I said, we had Senator Barnett leading the charge today. This is all about floating and selling a company and creating a whole new class of shareholders, just like with Telstra. I would suggest that it will not be the mums and dads and Nick Minchin’s mum who will be buying shares in Medibank Private; it will be purchased by big overseas health insurance companies. There is no doubt in the world that that is what is going to happen. They are circling; we know that. The third biggest health fund in this country is a foreign owned company, the second biggest is MBF and the biggest is Medibank Private. If Mr Russell Schneider—who we have had so many battles with across the table at estimates on issues to do with health care, rebates, subsidies, private versus public and so on—is concerned, then I am really concerned.

The other point I want to make is that Medibank Private, as I said at the start, was created in the context of providing a public universal health insurance system for medical coverage, which was Medibank and then became Medicare, complemented with private health insurance. That is the context in which you have to see this. It is inextricably linked to Medicare and it is inextricably linked to the government’s ability to maintain premiums in health insurance at a reasonable level. They have failed to do that, but at least they are lower than what they might have otherwise been. The government talks about having no business being in private health insurance. Their argument is that governments should not be in private health insurance. If that is the case, if they have no business being involved in it, why are they paying a 30 per cent rebate to every single private health insurance company in this country? This is just a bad decision. (Time expired)