Private Member's Business - Medicare

I love Medicare. When you are facing a global pandemic, I think every Australian would recognise just how lucky we are to have a public health system that allows all Australians to access health care regardless of their income or station in life. It is something we are truly lucky to have. As we are talking about current health challenges, I want to take this opportunity to thank all the health professionals who are protecting and helping people suffering from the coronavirus. Thank you to the doctors and nurses, the orderlies and the cleaners. Cleaners are the unsung heroes of our health system. Without cleaners you don't have a hospital, you just have a disease factory. Thank you to everyone in our hospitals who works to makes sure everyone in our hospitals is fed and thank you to everyone who works in hospital administration. My grandmother Pat worked in hospital admin at the Charlie Gairdner hospital in Perth for many, many years. It takes a village to run a hospital, and I want to thank every single person who is probably working a little more than they would have expected as a result of some of the health challenges our nation and the world faces.

As a child, I was a chronic asthmatic. I was in and out of hospital more times than my parents can count. They probably broke most of the traffic codes rushing me to and from hospital at different times. I'm so grateful that as a child I grew up under Medicare, that I grew up in Bob Hawke's Australia. I believe that Medicare is one of Australia's greatest public policy achievements. It is, in my view, more Australian that Vegemite. It's something that didn't have an easy start in life—poor Medicare—and it is something that we have had to fight to defend, time and time again.

I'm going to go through some of the history of Medicare. In 1975, the Whitlam government introduced Medibank, described by then health minister Bill Hayden as 'the most equitable and efficient means of providing health insurance coverage for all Australians'. But then from 1976 till 1983 we saw systematic destruction of the Medibank system by the Fraser government. In 1978 they made health insurance optional, effectively ending universal health care. Medibank Private was set up. Hospital agreements with the states and territories were ripped up and bulk-billing was restricted to just pension card holders. Thankfully, in 1983 the Hawke Labor government, as one of its first acts, began rebuilding the Medicare system and on 1 February 1984 restored Australia's universal healthcare system.

This motion has some interesting facts in it. The member for Stirling earlier mentioned facts and how important they are. I note that the member for Stirling failed to mention the five-year Medicare freeze that his government instituted. We also know that, while the member for Lyne has told us that 86.2 per cent of GP services are bulk-billed, the Australian Medical Association and the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners have themselves told us that these figures are misleading. They're calculated on services rather than on patients. A more honest figure is the one provided by the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners suggesting closer to 66 per cent of GP patient consultations are bulk-billed. The Department of Health's own data shows that in 2018-19 just 52.7 per cent of patients in the Perth electorate were bulk-billed when they visited their GP. Surveys show that only 23 per cent of GPs bulk-bill all their patients and that figure is going down and down and down.

When we think about the sorts of things that happen when people can't afford to visit their GP, it might mean that they actually end up costing our health system more, something that could have really catastrophic effects as we face global pandemics like the coronavirus. I will never let this government forget that in the 2014 budget of cuts and charges of the Abbott-Turnbull-Morrison government—and I'll give Joe Hockey an honourable mention as well—they attempted to introduce a $7 co-payment for GP visits. That was a terrible idea. It wasn't means-tested; it would have captured all patients. It would have captured children, pensioners, the chronically ill and people on Newstart. It was a terrible idea, all because of an ideological obsession with sending a price signal.

We know that the privatisation agenda of this government doesn't stop when it comes to sending price signals, to Medicare freezes, or to co-payments. We've just recently seen the government thankfully back down on their plans to privatise the Aged Care Assessment Team process