Page 1863 - Week 07 - Wednesday, 19 August 1992
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Nevertheless, Mr Moore's criticisms come from a politician who does not have to plan as a great party does and who does not have to run elections on the basis of those plans and then deliver those promises. He has the luxury of being able to criticise and to create. Mr Moore's creative speech was worth listening to.
Mr Kaine would be rather envious right now, after hearing such a performance. It was, indeed, an honourable performance; one which Mr Kaine, I am sure, would like to have made. So would his colleagues, had they been here. They are, after all, on strike. They are in deep trouble because they could be sacked and, as I said, they have no union to argue their case. Under their industrial relations system there would be nobody to conciliate either; we would have to go to the courts. Perhaps they could afford it.
Madam Speaker, the 1992-93 budget strengthens Medicare and provides funding to increase access for public patients to public hospitals. That, by any measure, is a plus. There is a $1.6 billion increase over six years in hospital funding and $1.23 billion of this will go to public hospitals. Nobody would criticise that level of funding going to the hospital system. This will be funded by a 0.15 per cent increase in the Medicare levy - another plus for the Federal Government. That will average out at about 80c per week for a worker on an average income. That is a small impost to pay for improving affordability and access to our public hospital system. Of course, the well off in our society will pay more by way of that increase. That is as it should be. Those who have achieved more out of our society, I am sure, will be delighted with the new entitlement to pay a little more. I certainly will be.
This is substantially cheaper than the $46 per week cost of top cover health insurance that the Liberals want to force people into. I have mentioned this before, over and over again, and I will continue to do so because I do not think that the impact of the Federal Liberal Party's health policies has properly sunk in with the community yet. They intend to force people into private hospital insurance and private health insurance, and at the end of the day the people will pay again because they will then subsidise those who go into private hospital insurance by way of tax relief.
The ACT will receive a relatively high level of the funding that flows from the Commonwealth budget, due to our relatively high level of public hospital services and patients. The increased funding will go a long way towards ending discrimination against patients. Admission to hospitals should be on the basis of clinical need - not health insurance status, as the Liberals are offering with what I have described before as the Kentucky Fried medicine that exists in the United States.
As well as the $1.23 billion in extra public hospital funding, an extra $70.9m will be provided over the next two years to target areas where there are long waiting lists for elective surgery. Madam Speaker, there will be places across Australia that are worse off than the ACT, but there is no denying that waiting lists, growing waiting lists, are a difficulty for public hospital systems and they have to be addressed. The approach taken by the Federal Government reinforces the ACT Government's goal of reducing discrimination in health care based on the level of insurance that a patient has. That is an honourable commitment, one that all will endorse.
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