QUESTIONS WITHOUT NOTICE
Mr BUTLER (Hindmarsh—Minister for Disability and the National Disability Insurance Scheme, Minister for Health and Ageing and Deputy Leader of the House) (14:12): A big reason why the member for Braddon got the biggest swing of any member in this House was her relentless support for a stronger Medicare and cheaper medicines. And, for her and for Labor, bulk-billing is the beating heart of Medicare.
The idea that all you need in this country to get great health care should be this little green and gold card is central to our philosophy. It was hard fought for. John Howard, the leader of the modern Liberal Party, said that bulk-billing was an absolute rort.
The AMA wanted to go on strike over bulk-billing. But, 30 years on, back in 2014, I think most of us thought the bulk-billing was here to stay. We didn't reckon on the Abbott government, of course—a government that tried to abolish bulk-billing altogether in their first budget.
When we blocked that GP tax in the other place, the then health minister, Peter Dutton, tried another way instead and introduced a years-long freeze to the Medicare rebate, thinking that, obviously, if you freeze the income of doctors, that will pressure them to move away from bulk-billing. Peter Dutton didn't last long as health minister, but any sense that his replacement might have changed course was pretty quickly disappointed.
I think we remember who that replacement was: the Leader of the Opposition. Now, as the new health minister, she could have changed direction, but instead she doubled down. In her budget in 2016 as health minister, she didn't just lock in Peter Dutton's Medicare rebate freeze; she extended it for all of the rest of the decade, marking herself out as the only health minister in the history of Medicare never once to increase the Medicare rebate.
Even Peter Dutton managed it once, but it was not done once under that health minister, marking her out as the person probably most responsible for the situation we inherited when we came to government—a situation with bulk-billing in freefall. That is not the word I use; it is the word used by the College of GPs. For those opposite, who for decades fought against universal health care and who hate that little green and gold card, that's exactly what they always wanted—the idea of user-pays health care.
For Labor, it was completely unacceptable, and that is why the last three years we've delivered the three biggest increases to the Medicare rebate since Paul Keating was prime minister; that's why we tripled the bulk-billing incentive from pensioners, concession cardholders and children; and that's why on Saturday we will roll out the biggest investment in Medicare's history to fix the mess that the Leader of the Opposition created when she was the health minister.