Page 2734 - Week 08 - Tuesday, 13 August 2019
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video
We were very fortunate. We are both well paid and have private medical insurance, so for us it was not a financial issue. In fact, for people in our position—in the position of everyone here—the crazy situation is that it is cheaper to have private medical insurance than not to have private medical insurance. It is 100 per cent paid for by the tax system; otherwise you pay an extra one per cent tax.
I remember when Peter Costello introduced this. After a few years I thought it was so inequitable that I did not have private insurance. But eventually the financial incentives for giving money to the private health system overcame my scruples and I succumbed. But this is really wrong. We are subsidising private health insurance for the well off. It is inequitable.
It also does not seem to be working. Private health insurance has been described as being in a death spiral. I actually think that we should let it die, and not a slow lingering death, which is what seems to be happening. It should be a quick death and the money should be put into an equitable public health system. While I am not a health guru, going to hospital has really made me reflect more than usual on what seems to be an increasingly inequitable health system. In saying this, I am not pointing the finger at the ACT government. I know that health is the biggest item in our budget. That is why we are talking about it first.
There are lots of other reasons for this problem—for example, vertical fiscal imbalance. The commonwealth government has more income than the states that have the responsibility for things like health and education, our ageing population, new medical treatments and, as I mentioned, the private health insurance system, which serves the interests of the private health insurance funds probably number one, and some doctors. But it is not clear that it serves the interests of the Australian population as a whole.
I appreciate that the ACT government is doing what it can with initiatives like the nurse-led walk-in centres, which is one thing to make health care more accessible to all of us. I am not suggesting that there is an easy answer, but I think it is something that we all need to pay more attention to. I was going to call it the Australian dream, but it is not the Australian dream. It was the Australian reality. A public health system that is free and accessible to everyone is becoming not a reality for an awful lot of us.
MRS DUNNE (Ginninderra) (10.37): I understand that there have been discussions between the whips and that there is going to be some latitude for me to conclude my comments on all three of the items bound up together. In anticipation, I thank the Assembly for that indulgence. After all, the health budget is one-third of the ACT government’s budget. Although we have decided to deal with this cognately, which is not a bad thing, the standing orders, if strictly applied, would not allow us the opportunity to speak as the budget and the importance of this item would demand.
The 2019-20 budget was delivered on 4 June. Already two significant events have changed the health budget significantly. The first occurred when the Chief Minister signed a brief creating the major projects agency, as part of CMTEDD, on 7 June, just
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video