Helen Polley (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister to the Leader (Tasmania)) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Health Insurance (Approved Pathology Specimen Collection Centres) Tax Amendment Bill 2018. Here we have another Liberal bill designed to clean up another Liberal mess. You'd be forgiven for thinking that that is all this government does in health—clean up the messes of its own making. This bill amends the Health Insurance (Approved Pathology Specimen Collection Centres) Tax Act 2000—I'd call it the 'Pathology Tax Bill' for short—to change the frequency of the tax paid by approved pathology collection centres. Presently, Australia's roughly 6,000 collection centres each pay a tax of $1,000 when first approved and when their approval is renewed each year. Under this bill, collection centres will pay a tax of $2,000 every two years instead of $1,000 every year. This is intended to reduce the regulatory burden for government and industry while maintaining the revenue raised by the tax. This is a minor but welcome change, and we will support this bill.

But let's look at the real reason the government has put this bill forward. This is damage control. This issue goes back to 2009, when Labor introduced bulk-billing incentives for pathology and diagnostic imaging services. It was a sensible policy and it worked. By 2014-15, 114.3 million pathology services were provided out of hospital, with almost all of them, 98.7 percent of them, at no cost to the patient. Diagnostic imaging bulk-billing rates rose 10 per cent in just six years, thanks to Labor's measures.

What did the Liberals do? They did what they always do in the health portfolio; they stuffed it up. One of the most significant cuts in this Prime Minister's first Mid-Year Economic and Fiscal Outlook was to Labor's bulk-billing incentives, in a bid to save $650 million. There was no commitment to reinvest the money in the health portfolio; rather, the money would go to fund their other policy priorities. Health is always their last priority. After all, they would rather give big business an $80 billion tax cut than properly fund health care.

We on this side knew that these changes would hurt patients, forcing out-of-pocket costs even higher. Obviously, the pathologists were also going to pass the costs on to the patients. Even worse, it would force some people to delay getting critical tests, putting their lives at risk. So we did what Labor always do when the Liberals try to cut funding from our health system; we fought back. The sector fought back too. Describing it as a 'copayment by stealth', the AMA warned the move would hit the poorest and sickest the hardest. But when has this government ever cared about those sorts of people? The sector's Don't Kill Bulk Bill campaign delivered a petition with 600,000 signatures, showing once again that the Australian people are deadset against this government's health cuts.

This campaign clearly gave the Prime Minister quite the fright because, the next thing you knew, he was standing up in the middle of the first election debate with the opposition leader and announcing he had struck a hasty pre-election deal with the sector—in a bid to shut them up for the rest of the campaign. It was a shameless and cynical stunt to get his government through the election.

Under this dodgy deal, pathologists accepted the abolition of the bulk-billing incentive in exchange for the government's pledge to regulate the rents that pathologists pay GPs to co-locate in their practices. GPs were of course furious, so in the government's hasty attempt to buy the silence of the pathologists they had made enemies of the family doctor. That is typical of this government's approach to health—half-baked ideas and unnecessary cuts followed eventually by the inevitable humiliating backflips. The government capitulated again and used the 2017 budget to break its deal with pathologists and ditch the rent regulation plan, and to backflip on the bulk-billing incentives that set off this whole sorry saga.

This bill is one of a number of policy changes the government has offered to the pathology sector by way of a grovelling apology. This bill is not health policy; it is dispute resolution. Thank you.