CONSTITUENCY STATEMENTS
Ms McKENZIE (Flinders) (10:00): If you wanted to design a policy that puts more pressure on hospitals, increases the cost of living for retirees and slams Australians for taking responsibility for their own health care, you would struggle to come up with a more punishing policy than Labor's private health insurance rebate changes for Australians over 65. The changes will make life harder for up to 1.4 million Australians aged over 65, who will be forced to pay up to $640 more every single year just to keep the private health cover that they currently have.
Nowhere will the impact be felt more than in Flinders. The Mornington Peninsula is one of the oldest electorates in Australia. Nearly one in three residents is aged 65 or over.
Consistent with the values of that generation, they are self-reliant, responsible, loath to be a burden on others, careful planners and great embodiments of one of the most admirable human qualities, which defined the work ethic of this nation: deferred gratification. More than 33,500 local seniors hold private health insurance in my electorate, the third highest take-up in the country.
Our people are not wealthy tycoons looking for a tax break. They are retirees. They are veterans.
They are grandparents and they are lifelong taxpayers who have spent decades paying their way. Now, many are telling me that they simply cannot afford Labor's latest hit on their wallet. Kevin from Mornington, and his wife, have held private health insurance for 58 years.
He writes: We never expected to be disadvantaged by our own government in our later years. Glynis from Safety Beach has paid into the system since she was a teenager, with 50-odd years of premiums and barely a claim. She says she simply won't be able to afford the increase.
This is the intergenerational fairness that this government is delivering. Anne from Mornington had a knee replacement last year and she couldn't have afforded it without her cover. I've heard the language coming from the other side in their typical Orwellian tongue-twisting way.
It's about 'intergenerational fairness' and 'sharing the burden'. It almost sounds sane until you meet the people on the receiving end. In Summerville, Toni's husband is midway through chemotherapy for liver cancer.
She's paid her premiums every year without fail. For Toni, this isn't about fairness. It's about whether her husband gets treatment.
For Flinders, this policy is not just unfair; it smashes my most vulnerable residents. When you make private health insurance less affordable, you don't save money; you simply move the cost somewhere else. This government did not cut the private health rebate for over-65s because it had to.
It did it because it thought it could. It looked at a group of people who have already paid their dues, who are too old to change their circumstances and who are too polite to make too much of a fuss, and it made its calculations.