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

Senator Brown, if you were listening, I just did. I withdrew it twice, but obviously your mind is on other things.

First of all, can I just correct the wrong and misleading statements just made by Senator Cameron? According to the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, Australian government expenditure on public hospitals increased every year from approximately $5.2 billion in 1995-96 to over $12 billion in 2007-2008. And from 1995-96, annual spending on health and aged care by the Australian government more than doubled from $19.5 billion in 1995 to $51.8 billion in 2007-08. Therefore, it is wrong and it is utterly and totally misleading for Senator Cameron and other senators on the other side to come into this place and continually peddle this lie about this so-called ripping $1 billion out. Clearly, they do not know that the facts are in the detail provided by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare.

I now come to the 'ideological rubbish' that Senator Cameron was accusing Senator Abetz of. What Senator Abetz was doing was quoting from a letter to the editor of the Hobart Mercury on 2 September 2004 from Julia Gillard. Not content with that, Ms Gillard again wrote a letter to the editor of the Courier Mail on 23 September 2004:

Your correspondent Russell McGregor (Letters, Sept 15) should have no concern that Labor will "erode" or abolish the 30 per cent government rebate for private health insurance. Labor is committed to the maintenance of this rebate and I have given an iron-clad guarantee of that on a number of occasions.

Signed Julia Gillard. What a joke! So, Senator Cameron, is that ideological rubbish? There is another letter to the Weekend Australian on 15 October 2005 from Ms Gillard:

On Thursday, 13 October, the Minister for Health, Tony Abbott, asserted in parliament that prior to the last election, I had a secret plan to scrap the private health insurance rebate and he cited Mark Latham's diaries as proof of this proposition. Yesterday Matt Price reported this claim by the minister as if it were a fact (The Sketch 14/10). The claim by the minister is completely untrue and should not have been reported as if it were true. The truth is that I never had a secret plan to scrap the private health insurance rebate and, contrary to Mr Latham's diaries, do not support such a claim … For all Australians who wanted to have private health insurance, the private health insurance rebate would have remained under a Labor government. I gave an iron-clad guarantee of that during the election.

Is that not an absolutely useless piece of drivel, because we know that everything this woman says is a complete and utter misleading fabrication? Here is another example. The woman is a serial liar, and of course we have seen this time and again.

Government senators interjecting—