Page 3879 - Week 15 - Tuesday, 15 December 1992
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Mr Berry: Hospital costs. You are wrong.
MR HUMPHRIES: These are total health costs, Mr Berry. The projection for 1992-93 shows that the figure will be down to 17 per cent. That is the nature of the problem we are facing at this time. The system just cannot cope. What does this Government do in response to that problem? There is clearly a contracting base of funding and an expanding number of people requiring the services that that base supports. What is this Government doing about it? We do not know, we are told, but we are going to manage better to find the solution to our problem.
Mr Berry: And negotiate with the Commonwealth.
MR HUMPHRIES: I beg your pardon. Manage better and negotiate harder. That is just codswallop. There is no way that this Government is going to face what in this financial year, on my calculations, will be a shortfall of at least $2m and probably much more. How is it going to cope with a shortfall of that kind without making drastic changes to the nature of health care and health services in this town? It is impossible.
We are going to see supplementation. We are going to see heaps and heaps and buckets and buckets full of supplementation. We can see it coming. If you cannot see it coming, Mr Berry, you must have blinkers on. Everybody else can see it. It is a factor which can be controlled. It is a factor which we can do something about if we are prepared to take on board the sorts of factors that the Minister himself raised at the Labor Party conference when he said that the health system in this country was under increasing pressure because of the policies of his own Federal Government. If he took that on board something would happen.
Madam Speaker, the fact is that private insurance contributes 11 per cent of total health funding in Australia; only 8 per cent is contributed by the Medicare levy. Clearly, there is an increasing problem in meeting the costs of our system. We must deal with that problem of restoring some equity between the two systems. If private health insurance falters, it means that we have to find the money somewhere else. Mr Berry, that means finding money from your pocket. Private health insurance is important for two principal reasons. It contributes revenue to the running of public hospitals and it allows people to be treated in private hospitals, allowing the pressure on our congested public hospital system to be alleviated.
I put it to the Government, Madam Speaker, that it is not being consistent here. It has a different policy according to the ideological bent of the Minister concerned. Mr Wood administers an education system which apparently he is happy to see as a dual system. We have private education and we have public education. Indeed, the ACT Government contributes handsomely every year to the cost of the private education system in our town. Mr Connolly maintains a system which is a dual system. We have private housing and we have public housing, and there is no mention from the Government of problems in that respect. I have heard neither Minister say to me, "We wish to stamp out the private part of this market and establish a public one instead. We want to make sure that there is no more private housing. We want to make sure that there is no more private education". We have not heard that.
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