Private Health Insurance (National Joint Replacement Register Levy) Amendment Bill 2025
Mr CHAFFEY (Parkes) (18:05): I rise to speak on the Private Health Insurance (National Joint Replacement Register Levy) Amendment Bill 2025. This bill makes a series of technical and administrative amendments to ensure the national joint-replacement register levy operates in line with its original policy intent. Specifically, the bill redefines who is responsible for paying the levy, ensuring that it applies to the current responsible person for the medical device listed on the Prescribed List of Medical Devices and Human Tissue Products, not just the original applicant.
This is a sensible and necessary change. It will ensure that the levy keeps pace with commercial changes over time, including where responsibility for a device listing is transferred between companies. The bill also includes validating provisions to mitigate any risk from past levy collections.
The National Joint Replacement Register, or NJRR, plays a vital role in monitoring and improving patient safety and surgical outcomes for Australians receiving joint replacements. The registry, administered by the Australian Orthopaedic Association, collects and analyses data from all relevant hospitals across Australia to help define, improve and maintain the quality of care for joint replacement surgery.
The AOA receives Commonwealth funding for aspects of the registry's administration through a grants agreement, and these costs are efficiently recovered through the levy imposed under the Private Health Insurance (National Joint Replacement Register Levy) Act 2009. This bill will ensure that the levy continues to function efficiently and consistently with its original purpose to support the continued collection and analysis of high-quality data on joint replacement outcomes.
Therefore, the coalition supports the bill. It is a sensible, technical measure that will improve the operation of the national joint replacement levy. These amendments are administrative.
They are consistent with the coalition's longstanding support for efficient, transparent and accountable administration of Australia's health system. Whilst the coalition supports the bill, it is worth noting that greater action is needed by the Albanese Labor government to ensure that Australian patients have timely access to elective surgeries, such as joint replacement, including ensuring our hospital system has funding certainty going forward and addressing the underlying cause of bed block in our hospitals.
Reports from the states and territories about the ongoing negotiations on the next national health reform agreement—the agreement that determines the Commonwealth contribution to hospital funding—are deeply concerning. The Prime Minister has already broken a key promise on hospital funding. He promised to deliver a new five-year national health reform agreement with the states and territories from 1 July 2025, but he has failed to negotiate, leaving our hospitals in a state of uncertainty at a time when they are facing enormous pressure.
Instead of fixing this failure and securing the future of our hospitals, the Prime Minister appears to be sending them backwards. The Prime Minister needs to be honest with the Australian public about whether he intends to break his promise to fund 42.5 per cent of hospital costs by 2030. If he does, that would not just be a broken promise; it would be a betrayal of the patients, families and frontline health workers who rely on certainty in hospital funding.
The Albanese Labor government is clearly failing Australian patients at a time when our health system needs stability and confidence more than ever. Across the country, waiting lists are growing. Hospitals are stretched.
Patients are waiting months, sometimes years, for procedures that are critical for their mobility, independence and quality of life. A key part of this challenge is the growing issue of bed block, where older Australians who are ready to be discharged from hospital can't leave because they are waiting for access to an aged-care service. It is not only distressing for patients and their families; it also has a direct impact on the availability of hospital beds and the ability to perform elective surgeries.
The Albanese government must address the underlying cause of bed block, particularly by ensuring that older Australians have timely access to the aged-care support they need. Most urgently, waiting times to access home-care packages have skyrocketed under Labor. Before the election, Labor promised to deliver 83,000 new home-care packages from 1 July 2025.
But, instead of following through, they withheld support, even though the sector and the department were ready to deliver on it. As a result, not a single new home-care package was released into the system this financial year. This failure has devastating consequences.
The priority waiting list has now blown out to almost 109,000 older Australians, a 400 per cent increase in just two years. Wait times for the package have tripled. Tragically, almost 5,000 older Australians died in the past year while waiting for a home-care package, while it was only after a coordinated, pressured campaign from the coalition that the government finally caved and agreed to our amendments to guarantee the release of at least 83,000 new home-care packages by the end of this financial year.
This includes the immediate release of 20,000 packages and a further 20,000 by the end of the year. This was a win for older Australians in desperate need of assistance, but it should never have taken such pressure to get there. Labor faced a choice—listen to the coalition and release the packages, or vote against us and continue to deny vulnerable Australians the support they desperately need.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, Minister for Health and Ageing Mark Butler and Minister for Aged Care and Seniors Sam Rae still need to explain to Australia why it took the coalition holding their feet to the fire in the Senate to release this much-needed support. This support should have happened months ago. It is a black mark on this government that they were purposely withholding support for hundreds of thousands of older Australians who desperately needed it.
The coalition has stood up for older Australians across the country—Australians whom this government have abandoned. The money was in the budget. The capacity was there.
The only thing standing in the way was Labor. This is a crisis of the government's own making, and there is still more work to be done. Now the test is on the government to provide timely and transparent data to show that they're keeping their promise.
Have they released the 20,000 new packages they promised immediately? Will they deliver an additional 20,000 by the end of the year and a further 43,000 by the end of this financial year? This is the minimum that must occur.
It must occur on time. The coalition will continue to fight for older Australians, with one clear goal—that no-one should have to wait for the care that they have been assessed as needing. The DEPUTY SPEAKER ( Mr Georganas ): The member will resume his seat.
The member for Macarthur on a point of order? Dr Freelander: A point of order on relevance—the member is not speaking to the bill at all. The DEPUTY SPEAKER: I am listening to the member for Parkes and will ask him to keep within the parameters of the legislation.
Mr CHAFFEY: So, once again, the coalition supports this bill, because it represents practical policy to improve the efficiency and integrity of a key health administration process. But we will continue to hold the Albanese Labor government to account for their failures on hospital funding, access to elective surgery and aged-care delivery. Australians deserve a government that delivers on its promises, not a government that says one thing and does another.
Australians deserve access to the support they need, when they need it, whether that's in a hospital, through a home-care package or in residential aged care. I commend the bill to the House.