Jan McLucas (Queensland, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Mental Health) Share this | Hansard source

  I am pleased to rise today to speak on the Private Health Insurance Amendment Bill (No. 2) 2014. This bill intends to transfer the functions of the Private Health Insurance Ombudsman to the Office of the Commonwealth Ombudsman. It was introduced by the government as part of their smaller government commitment. It is still unclear, though, how much money this activity will save. When the bill was passing through the House of Representatives, the shadow minister, Catherine King, outlined the reservations that were held by the Labor Party around the transfer of the operations from the Private Health Insurance Ombudsman to the Commonwealth Ombudsman. The bill was also referred to the Senate Community Affairs Legislation Committee for inquiry. This process of referring bills to committees is one of the great pieces of democratic infrastructure that we have in this place. It allows a committee to interrogate all the questions that various senators and parties have. The community affairs committee recommended that the bill be passed, and that is what we are going to do today.

The role of the Private Health Insurance Ombudsman was established to protect the interests of people who are consumers of private health insurance. We wanted to be confident that the protections for those consumers remained—and we were assured that that was the case. The Ombudsman assists health fund members to resolve disputes through an independent complaints handling service. The Ombudsman identifies underlying problems in the practices of private health funds or healthcare providers in relation to the administration of private health insurance. The Ombudsman provides advice to government and to industry about issues affecting consumers in relation to private health insurance and provides advice and recommendations to government and industry about private health insurance—specifically, the performance of the sector and the nature of the complaints. They produce a document very regularly—I think it is quarterly—and it is a very useful document for consumers to understand the trends in private health insurance, and we would hope that the Ombudsman would take on that role as well.

Labor respects the office of the Commonwealth Ombudsman, and notes that it also serves the Defence Force, immigration, law enforcement, taxation, the postal industry, the ACT and the Overseas Students Ombudsman as well, so it is not unusual for the Commonwealth Ombudsman to have specific tasks outside of the general role of the Ombudsman. So Labor will be supporting this bill that will amalgamate the PHI Ombudsman with the Commonwealth Ombudsman, and I commend it to the House.