Anne Ruston (SA, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Health and Aged Care) Share this | Hansard source

I rise today to speak on the Private Health Insurance (National Joint Replacement Register Levy) Amendment Bill 2025. This bill makes a series of technical administrative amendments to ensure the national joint replacement register levy operates in line with its original policy intent. Specifically, the bill redefines who is responsible for paying the levy, ensuring it applies to the current responsible person for a medical device listed on the prescribed list of medical devices and human tissue products, not just the original applicant. This is a sensible and necessary change. It ensures that the levy keeps pace with commercial changes over time, including where responsibility for a device listing is transferred between companies. The bill also includes validating provisions to mitigate risks from past levy collections.

The national joint replacement registry, or the NJRR, plays a vital role in monitoring and improving patient safety and surgical outcomes for Australians receiving joint replacements. The registry, administered by the Australian Orthopaedic Association, collects and analyses data from all relevant hospitals across Australia to help define, improve and maintain the quality of care in joint replacement surgery. The Australian Orthopaedic Association receives Commonwealth funding for aspects of the registry's administration, through a grants agreement, and these costs are efficiently recovered through the levy imposed under the Private Health Insurance (National Joint Replacement Register Levy) Act 2009.

The bill ensures that the levy continues to function effectively and consistent with its original purpose—to support the continued collection and analysis of high-quality data on joint replacement outcomes. Therefore, the coalition supports the bill. It is a sensible, technical measure that improves the operation of the levy. These amendments are administrative, and they are consistent with the coalition's longstanding support for the efficient, transparent and accountable administration of Australia's healthcare system.

While the coalition supports this bill, it is also worth noting that greater action is needed by the Albanese Labor government to ensure that Australian patients have timely access to elective surgeries such as joint replacements, including ensuring that our hospital systems have funding certainty, going forward, and addressing the underlying causes of bed block in our hospitals.

Reports from the states and territories about the ongoing negotiations on the next National Health Reform Agreement, the agreement that determines the Commonwealth's contribution to hospital funding, are deeply concerning. The Prime Minister has already broken his promise on hospital funding. He promised to deliver a new five-year National Health Reform Agreement with the states and territories for 1 July 2025, but he has failed to negotiate it, leaving our hospitals in a state of uncertainty at a time when they're facing enormous pressure.

Instead of fixing this failure and securing the future of our hospitals, the Prime Minister appears to be sending them backwards. The Prime Minister needs to be honest with the Australian public about whether he intends to break another promise, and that is his promise to fund 42.5 per cent of hospital costs by 2030. If he does, that would not just be a broken promise; it would be a betrayal of patients, families and frontline health workers, who rely on certainty in hospital funding. The Albanese Labor government is clearly failing Australian patients at a time when our health system needs stability and confidence more than ever.

Across the country, waiting lists are growing, hospitals are stretched and patients are waiting months, sometimes years, for procedures that are critical to their mobility, independence and quality of life. Part of this challenge is the growing issue of bed block, where older Australians who are ready to be discharged from hospital cannot leave because they are waiting for access to home-care packages. This is not only distressing for the patients and their families; it also has a direct impact on the availability of hospital beds and the ability to perform elective surgeries. The Albanese government must address the underlying causes of bed block, particularly by ensuring older Australians have timely access to the aged-care support that they have been determined as needing.

Most urgently, waiting times to access home-care packages have skyrocketed under Labor. Before the election, the government promised to deliver 83,000 new home-care packages from 1 July 2025, but, instead of following through, they withheld that support, even though the sector and the department said that they were ready to deliver these packages. As a result, not a single home-care package was released into the system for the first quarter of this financial year. This failure has had devastating consequences. The priority waiting list of Australians who have been assessed as needing care to keep them in their homes has blown out to 121,000 older Australians. Waiting times have tripled and, tragically, many thousands of Australians have lost their lives while waiting to get the care that they've been assessed as needing.

It was only after a coordinated campaign between the coalition, the crossbench and the Greens in this place that we forced the government to cave and start releasing some of those 83,000 packages recently. We demanded that all of those packages be released by the end of the financial year. We also demanded that they immediately release 20,000 of them. This was a win for older Australians. A further 20,000 will be released before the end of this calendar year. As I said, this is a win for older Australians, but it should never have needed to happen. It shouldn't have needed our pressure for this to take place.

Labor faces a choice: listen to older Australians desperately in need of assistance or vote against us and continue to deny vulnerable older Australians the support they desperately need. The Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, his health minister, Mark Butler, and the aged-care minister, Sam Rae, still need to explain to Australians why it took the coalition, the crossbench and the Greens holding their ground in the Senate for them to release this much-needed support. As I said, this should have happened months ago, but at least it's happened now.

It is a black mark against the government that they were purposefully withholding support from over 100,000 older Australians who had been assessed by this government as needing that care. The coalition has stood up for older Australians across the country, Australians who the government had abandoned. The money was in the budget. The capacity was there. The only thing standing in the way of older Australians getting aged-care packages was the Labor government. This was a crisis of the government's own making.

There's still much work to be done. We know that as we stand here there are nearly 120,000 additional older Australians who are waiting to be assessed for a home-care package. They aren't even reflected in the figures that we see of the 121,000 older Australians who have been assessed for a package and are waiting for one. So we are talking about nearly 240,000 older Australians who are being denied the care that they need because this government is actively choosing not to make it available.

The coalition will continue to fight for older Australians, with one clear goal—that no-one should have to wait for the care that they have been assessed as needing. So, once again, as I said, the coalition will support this bill because it represents a practical policy to improve the efficiency and integrity of a key health administration process. But we will continue to hold the Albanese Labor government to account for its failures on hospital funding, elective surgery access and aged-care delivery. Australians deserve a government that delivers on its promises, not a government that says one thing and does another. Australians deserve access to support they need when they need it, whether that's in our hospitals, through our aged-care system, at home or in residential care. That is why I am tabling a second reading amendment as circulated in my name to call out the government for this hospital crisis that they are perpetuating.