Page 3285 - Week 12 - Thursday, 19 November 1992
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MRS CARNELL: That is social justice, Mr De Domenico. The Federal Labor Government and this local monstrosity have vastly worsened the waiting list problem, and long waiting lists have reduced the level of access of people with lower incomes to our health system. People with lower incomes used to be able to get into hospital. That has gone. Nationally, there are over 100,000 people on waiting lists. Locally, 1,972 people are on our hospital booking lists - an increase of 20 per cent on the number at the same time last year. Now we truly have a two-tiered hospital system.
One can only ask: How true has Labor been to its own cause - its own much proclaimed social justice? The fact is that the Labor Party has betrayed its own cause. People in the Labor Party are not offended, or do not seem to be offended, by the fact that people on incomes over $50,000 a year do not have to have private health insurance, while 600,000 people on incomes below $250 a week are forced to take out health insurance because they are worried about whether they will get into a public hospital. Is this social justice?
One should also note that the Labor Party policy is at odds with its own supporters. The Quadrant survey, commissioned by the Health Insurance Association, showed that 65 per cent of those intending to vote Labor at the next Federal election believe that there should be a choice of private health fund. There is only one member of the Labor Party who can truly claim to be true to this cause, and that, of course, is Keith Wilson from Western Australia. Mr Wilson obviously felt before he resigned that he was in an invidious position, that he could not sign a Medicare agreement that he and any other rational person would object to; yet he was being coerced to do so, and he took the track that any honest person would take and resigned.
Madam Speaker, it is clear that we have to sign a Medicare agreement, but it is certainly clear that we should not sign this Medicare agreement - a Medicare agreement that will cost the ACT $21m.
Mr De Domenico: If you say it quickly it does not sound so much, does it?
MRS CARNELL: It still sounds a lot. The importance of this new Medicare agreement to the people of the ACT is that it will undermine the health of the people. Mr Berry will not improve the health of the people if he signs this agreement. He will be signing the death warrant of our public hospital system. He will be selling short the health of every Canberran and he will be undermining every social justice principle in the book.
MR LAMONT (3.42): I am rather surprised, Madam Speaker. I thought we would get something new from the Opposition in this debate, but all we have got is the usual tripe. You would think that when they bagged it as a lousy system they would have had the same good grace as some of the other well-known international conservatives such as Churchill, who said that, although democracy was a terrible system, it happened to be the best system devised in all of human history. That is exactly the way I regard Medicare.
What we have on the other side of this chamber is the same philosophy as that of another well-known conservative. They have adopted what I regard as the Jeff Kennett approach to Medicare and to the health system. They have adopted the Jeff Kennett system.
Mr Moore: What is that?
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