Mathias Cormann (WA, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Health Administration) Share this | Hansard source

So 1.7 million? I am pleased to hear that the minister is still listening. There are 1.7 million Australians facing an automatic increase in the cost of their private health insurance—up to 42 per cent—as a result of the government’s actions.

Labor has form on this, of course. Labor has been waging an ideological war on Australians with private health insurance for decades. From Whitlam to Hawke to Keating, they have been at it. After the Hawke and Keating governments, the proportion of Australians with private health insurance plummeted from 63 per cent to 30 per cent before the Howard government was able to turn the ship around and restore some balance in our health system. This government, in opposition, said they were going to be different, that they had learnt from their mistakes of the past, they knew that what Whitlam and Hawke and Keating had done to our health system by undermining Australians with private health insurance was the wrong thing to do. They made an absolutely clear and unequivocal commitment that they were going to retain the private health insurance rebate. They said, ‘We won’t touch it.’

Those of us on this side of the chamber were a bit suspicious as to how genuine that commitment was. We asked questions in the lead-up to the last election. We raised doubts. We were not quite sure that the Labor Party really meant it when they said they would retain the existing private health insurance rebate. Do you know what the then opposition health spokeswoman, Nicola Roxon, said it was? She said it was a Liberal scare campaign. She put out a press release on 26 September 2007 that said:

Federal Labor rejects the Liberal scare campaign around the Private Health Insurance rebates.

The Liberal Party scare campaign this morning reared its head …

On many occasions for many months, Federal Labor has made it crystal clear that we are committed to retaining all of the existing Private Health Insurance rebates…

The now Prime Minister, the then Leader of the Opposition, wrote to the Australian Health Insurance Association. He said:

Both my Shadow Minister for Health, Nicola Roxon, and I have made it clear that we are totally committed to retaining the existing private health insurance rebate.

That was before the election. We asked questions, being suspicious in the context of Peter Garrett’s remarks: ‘Once we get in, we will just change it all.’ We asked questions again and again in estimates. We asked: ‘Are you sure? Are you really committed?’ Leo Shanahan from the Age did some good investigative journalistic work. He wrote an article about Treasury advice recommending to the government that it should scrap the rebate. So questions were asked. And what did the health minister, Nicola Roxon, say only in February this year? She said that the government was firmly committed to retaining the existing private health insurance rebate. Now of course we know that at that time the government was busily working on plans to scrap the rebate.

This is a blatant broken promise that will hurt not only Australians with private health insurance, but all Australians who need timely and affordable access to quality hospital care. By pushing people out of private health insurance, by pushing people into public hospitals that are already overburdened and overstretched, the government is going to make it harder for people who currently have to rely on the public system by forcing them to compete with people who have left their private cover.

The minister today said, ‘Last year you said a million people would leave.’ No, actually Treasury modelling said that 660,000 Australians would leave private health insurance’—and their savings were based on it. He knows that it is much too early to assess the impact. We have not even had one quarter of membership data since the watered down version of their attack last year was implemented. This is a government that has form in its ideological war on private health and people cannot trust a word it is saying on private health insurance. (Time expired)