Concetta Fierravanti-Wells (NSW, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Ageing) Share this | Hansard source

It is indeed, Senator Cormann. The government does not want us talking about climate change and its big new tax on everything. The government promised before the last federal election that they had this grand plan to fix the hospitals and health. We did not see anything. Interestingly, three weeks ago the secretary of the Department of Health and Ageing admitted in estimates that there was not a plan. They could not even produce the back of an envelope when I asked questions in estimates. Now all off a sudden they are scrambling. Because the pressure has been on, suddenly the Prime Minister has come out with his big health plan so that—as Senator Cormann said—he can traipse around the hospitals with his little hat on and pretend that he is actually doing something.

After two-and-a-half years of gestation, this plan still is very light on policy detail. There is absolutely no detail on how it is going to be funded. After two-and-a-half years with no grand plan, all of a sudden we see something, which has obviously been cobbled together because everybody kept asking him where his hospital plan was. And all this plan actually does is put in place another layer of bureaucracy. We already have 5,000 health bureaucrats in Canberra. So what are we going to do? We are going to add more health bureaucrats and not one single extra bed. That is all that the Prime Minister’s grand plan is going to do. It is not going to fix the hospital systems.

Anybody who has seen the New South Wales hospital system knows that the area health systems are not working. So what is this government going to do? It is going to put another layer of bureaucracy on top of the area health systems. There is nothing there that is going to fix the New South Wales health system. The plan is so ramshackle. But this government is going to come along and put a few more extra bureaucrats in place and they are somehow—so the Prime Minister is telling us—going to fix the hospital system.

Health insurance is integral to health in this country. The legislation that we are debating today is a tax on health insurance; a tax that Kevin Rudd promised that he would not impose. Both Kevin Rudd and Nicola Roxon promised repeatedly before the last election that they would not alter the health insurance rebates. Mr Rudd even put his promise in writing. As I said previously, that promise was not worth the paper that it was written on. This new tax has already been rejected by this parliament, but Labor is ideologically fixated on imposing it.

All Australians will pay a price if this new tax is imposed. By the government’s own estimates, tens of thousands of people would drop their insurance coverage. Then those people will have to rely on the public health system. And the queues at the emergency departments and the waiting lists for surgeries would grow longer, especially in places like New South Wales. As more people drop out of insurance, premiums will rise for the 11 million Australians who have private insurance. When I spoke on the surcharge bills, I spoke of those thousands of people who have private health insurance in many of Labor’s own seats, such as the 72 per cent of people in the federal seat of Bennelong, Maxine McKew’s seat.