Page 3877 - Week 15 - Tuesday, 15 December 1992
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Mr Lamont: If he feels sensitive about it now, although he was not then. It is indicative that there must have been some truth in the original statement.
MR DEPUTY SPEAKER: It is the festive season, Mr Lamont. Thank you.
MR HUMPHRIES: This matter of public importance is about improving access through the private health system to a strong and viable public hospital system. Mr Deputy Speaker, you do not need to be Socrates to realise that when we talk about a strong, viable and accessible public hospital system we are not talking about the present ACT public hospital system - far from it. The question, though, that we pose in the matter of public importance we have raised today is: How do we turn around the concerns which obviously are given rise to by the failure of this Government to harvest the benefits of the private hospital system and the private insurance system, and what can we do to make sure that the obvious problems endured by our public hospital system in the ACT do not continue?
Let me state at the outset that we in the Liberal Party are not against or for one sector or the other in this debate. We believe that both must cooperate to provide a valid and viable system for health in the ACT, just as we believe in both the public and private education system, public and private housing, and public and private distribution of food and other essential services. The problem, Mr Deputy Speaker, is that we have here a government which is clearly hostile to private health insurance but has nothing to offer in its place. It has no alternative vision which provides at least the same level of service and care which ACT citizens have enjoyed with the present dual system.
Let me make clear what we on this side do not want. What we do not want is a sort of two-nation syndrome where we have, on the one hand, an efficient private hospital system which offers high-quality care but only to the rich contrasted, on the other hand, with a public hospital system which is run down and overcrowded and basically catering only to the poor because only the poor have no choice in which system they go to. That is not what this party wants, Mr Deputy Speaker. What we want is an integrated system under which quality is available in both sectors and those who can afford it contribute properly to the cost of their own health care and those who cannot still have access to a high-quality health system. That, Mr Deputy Speaker, is the nub of this debate.
Mr Berry: Do you want tax subsidies?
MR HUMPHRIES: Yes, tax subsidies are an important way of achieving that. What has happened to the Australian hospital system? Let me explain, for the benefit particularly of Mr Berry, the changes that have occurred over the last 10 years or so in hospital care in this country. Of course, Medicare was introduced back in 1984, promising four things, essentially: Universality, which means everybody is covered by it; accessibility - everyone gets treatment when they want it; equity - that is, it is paid for fairly; and simplicity.
Those were the four principles on which Medicare was based, but it did not take long before it became very evident that it was very difficult to pay for those four principles in the Australian context - indeed, in the context of any nation in the Western world - and progressively we have seen all subsidies to those who maintain private health insurance, in contradistinction to the public system, gradually removed by the Federal Labor Government. The last of those subsidies were removed effectively at the end of 1987.
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