CHECK AGAINST DELIVERY EMBARGOED UNTIL. DELIVERY
SPEECH BY THE PRIME MINISTER
CAMPAIGN LAUNCH FOR SIMON CREAN
MELBOURNE 4 FEBRUARY 1990
I am going to leave you in doubt as to when the election is
to be held.
But I will leave you in no doubt at all that whenever it is
held, it will see Simon Crean elected to Federal Parliament
as an important addition to the ranks of the Labor
Government. I have said in the past that there is a deep and
unbridgeable policy chasm dividing this Labor Government
from the collection of New Right ideologues who run the
conservative Coalition.
One critical aspect of this chasm has been the differences
between us about how Australians as a community crpatp and
earn our national prosperity.
As Simon has just described, the two parties have for more
than a decade been consistently and sharply and profoundly
divided on this great question of industrial relations.
An equally important aspect of this chasm between the
Government and the Opposition concerns the way in which
Australians as a community di-girihute the proceeds of
national prosperity.
What the Opposition's health fiasco tells us so clearly is
that on this critical policy, Labor and conservatives stand
for diametrically opposite values.
Under this Government, we've created a system of health
insurance that provides security to the sick and the
elderly,-and to Australian-fami-lies-who would otherwise have
to fend for themselves.
Medicare is quite simply the most successful health
insurance policy Australia has ever known.
It is universal and it is fair.
It has brought two million Australian who were previously
unprotected in under the umbrella of health insurance. Now
all Australians are covered for essential medical and
hospital treatment.
More people than ever before are receiving treatment in our
hospital systems. Compared to the last year before Medicare
was introduced, this year some 600,000 more people will get
hospital treatment.
And it is financed responsibly and fairly, through the
health insurance levy. People on higher incomes pay more;
people on lower incomes pay less.
Let us be very clear at the outset what it is that the
Opposition is proposing to do.
When you scrape away the dissembling and the code words,
what you find is the conservatives' plain and simple
determination to smash Medicare.
They would throw millions of Australians out in the cold:
forcing families to run the risk of major medical or
hospital costs without the safe, simple, efficient and fair
protection offered by Medicare.
Let's look at the facts.
In place of this fair and universal system, what the
Opposition wants to do is, in Mr Shack's words, " quite
simply to get back to a better mix between the public
and private funding of the health care system".
Translate the code words, and you have an Opposition policy
that would destroy Medicare by driving as many people as
possible back into the arms of the private health insurance
funds. Those who can't afford private health insurance would be
left out in the cold.
Those people whom Mr Peacock described last November as
" silly enough" to do without private health insurance " for
whatever reason" that is, if they can't afford it would
have no protection against the sudden trauma of massive
doctors' bills or hospital bills.
This is not theory; it is fact.
The only choice people would have is either to take out
private health insurance, or to run the risk of huge medical
and hospital bills.
Inevitably, some of those who are forced to choose the
latter will incur bills they cannot pay.
What happens then? In the past, some have gone to jail as
debtors. In South Australia, in the years before Medibank,
more people were jailed for failing to pay hospital and
doctors' bills than for any other single debt related
offence. Do Australians really want to turn the clock back to that
Dickensian society?
Do Australians want families to be destroyed because they
run the risk of unaf fordable health bills?
Yet this would be the real effect of the Peacock/ Shack
health fiasco not the hypocritical humbug they spout about
protecting families in a fairer, more compassionate
Australia. It was that famous press conference held by the Opposition's
health spokesman, the hapless Mr Shack, that brought all
this into clear focus.
But the conservatives' real priorities have been clear for
many years.
The Fraser Government dismantled Medibank, despite
Mr Fraser's personal and explicit promise to protect it.
Now a Peacock Opposition wants to dismantle Medicare.
What a disaster of an alternative Government!
They've been in Opposition for seven years, and they have to
call a press conference on the eve of a long weekend, to
announce that they don't have a costed policy.
But at least Mr Shack got something right.
Mr Shack said: " The Liberal and National Parties do not
have a particularly good track record in health, and you
don't need me to remind you of our last period in
government." I couldn't have put it better myself.
And then there was this Freudian slip: " You might accuse us
of a lot of things, but one of the things that I don't think
we're guilty of is learning from our past mistakes."
But the sole qatZd initiative after seven years of
Opposition as opposed to the hidden agenda to do away with
Medicare was to set up a committee in Government to try
and find the answers that have eluded the conservatives in
Opposition. This non-policy came only after months in which Mr Peacock
and Mr Shack repeatedly promised they were about to produce
a fully costed, detailed health policy.
It was just around the corner, they said. It was on the
way. Last November, for example, Mr Peacock assured Australians
that his health policy would be " the most successful and
supported health policy, and I'm very confident of that."
" It's not for me to release," he said, " but for Mr Shack,
because it's such a very good health policy."
This was at a time when there was basically no health policy
at all!
There was no health policy because there was no way of
meeting the Opposition's twin goals that no-one would be
worse of f and that the Government would be required to spend
no extra money.
Those twin goals always sounded like pie in the sky to
anyone who understood anything about health funding.
Now, at last, even the Opposition has accepted that they
were pie in the sky.
It seems more likely that, if ever the conservative health
policy was implemented, it would fail bath tests.
Smashing Medicare would certainly leave many people worse
off. And funding a replacement for Medicare would certainly
involve a large but unspecified Government expenditure.
Mr Shack would only estimate the cost to be " somewhere
between zero and $ 2.6 billion, depending on how many people
opt out of the system".
But don't be fooled into thinking that any extra Opposition
spending on health would end up in the pockets of ordinary
Australians. It would represent instead a direct subsidy, by the
taxpayers, of private health insurance companies, private
hospitals, and private doctors.
That's where the money would be going
-Whn--he e-ased--where' s--the -money -eoming from, Mr Shack
refused to say. Or more precisely, he had no answer. It
had to wait for what he called " Budget Cabinet" sometime in
the first year of a Peacock Government.
Of course, the implications of those words go far beyond the
limits of a health policy.
They go to the heart of the Opposition's entire Economic
Action Plan.
Mr Shack was asked how he would fund the extra costs would
there be higher taxes or greater spending cuts. His answer:
this is a decision for Budget Cabinet.
If you can't answer the fundamental questions about taxation
levels and spending cuts, you don't have an economic action
plan. If you can't answer those fundamental questions, your entire
budgetary strategy is in tatters.
Mr Peacock cannot assure people that what he promises to
give with one hand such as child care rebates won't be
taken away with the other in the form of a new health tax
or even deeper cuts in some critical area of Government
spending. The conservatives have a simple motive for wanting to
destroy Medicare.
They want to satisfy at last the vested interests who have
opposed Medicare ever since it was first introduced as
Medibank by Gough Whitlam.
You can hardly ask for a more clear-cut case of the
distorted priorities of the Opposition.
They put self-interest and vested interest ahead of national
interest and the interests of Australian families.
They put ideology ahead of rational, common sense public
policy. And they put the chaos of unplanned change ahead of the
stability and fairness of Medicare.
Andrew Peacock may think that he has taken health of f the
election agenda by making Peter Shack run the gauntlet of
the Press Gallery on the eve of a long weekend.
But I can assure you that I and my Ministers will be making
sure, every day, health stays on the election agenda.
Because if you want a single policy that is a crucial test
of both responsible economic management and effective social,
justice, then health policy is it.
-And -the oonservat-ives-L-eouldn de 4rver -en -their health
promises. They couldn't get the figures to add up; they
couldn't meet the expectations they had raised.
So every day, my Ministers and I will be reminding the
Australian people of the conservatives' real agenda: to
smash Medicare.