Mathias Cormann (WA, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

As Senator Humphries said, we got a mandate from the Australian people. The GST was announced in August 1998, we had an election in October 1998 and the next budget, in May 1999, contained all of the budget information about the GST. These are the sorts of misleading statements that the spin doctors of this deceitful government go out and spread in the press gallery. I could go through a whole list of other examples, but I will not bore you with it today.

This is a government that does not care about the cost-of-living pressures faced by Australian families. This is a government that has Australian families squarely in its sights. Do you know which families it has in its sights in particular? Families that aspire to get ahead, families that want to do the best for their family. They want to get a better job, they want to earn some more money, and what is going to happen if they do so under this government? They will be hit with more penalising taxes or with variations of tax, taking tax breaks away from them. This is what the Labor Party does. There is a range of examples. For sometime now we have had on the government's book the proposal to abolish the private health insurance rebate for millions of Australians. This is an absolutely ridiculous proposal.

I was on Richo last night and I will share my experience with the chamber. Former Senator Graham Richardson was the federal Minister for Health back in 1993. He inherited that portfolio after 10 years of Labor government attacks on the private health system. The private health system was collapsing when Senator Graham Richardson became the federal Minister for Health. Private health insurance membership was in freefall and former Senator Richardson was desperately trying to do something to halt the decline. Do you know what he came up with as a proposal at the time? He proposed to have a Medicare levy surcharge. He proposed to have a surcharge applied to those Australians without private health insurance that earned above certain thresholds. Of course, Paul Keating and the unions stopped him from doing it. They stopped him from getting away with it.

John Howard and the Howard government introduced a package of measures that restored balance to our health system, that actually provided incentive for Australians to take additional responsibility for their healthcare needs, that encouraged them to take out private health insurance to take the burden off our public hospitals. This was a very, very successful package of initiatives. What has this government done? They have not learnt from history; they want to go back to the failures of the Hawke-Keating government; they want to again attack and pursue those Australians who are prepared to take additional responsibility for their healthcare needs by taking the private health insurance rebate away from them.

This budget is full of class warfare. It is full of more taxes, it is full of more waste. The debt and deficit are blowing out and this a very sad situation for Australia. It is time that we return to good government. It is time that we return to a coalition government which can restore strength and resilience to our budget and which can restore strength and resilience to our economy.