Health Legislation Amendment (Improving Choice and Transparency for Private Health Consumers) Bill 2026

Mr WALLACE (Fisher) (18:22): To hear those members opposite in 2026 constantly bang on about 'Mediscare' campaigns is really getting just a little bit beyond the pale. They tried it in all of the last few elections. I don't know how many times I have to say this—in the words of the Prime Minister: 'How many times do I have to say this?

Fifty times?'—this coalition is committed to Medicare. I am committed to Medicare. The last thing I want to see, as someone who has had two very, very dangerously life-threatening illnesses befall two of my four kids, is a US-style health system in this country.

The coalition is absolutely committed to ensuring that it doesn't matter where you live, what your postcode is or what your income is—if you are an Australian citizen or permanent resident, you should be able to get access to Medicare and be treated for whatever illness or injury you have by world-leading doctors and hospitals. I don't know how many times I have to say that, because those Labor members opposite just seem to think, 'We'll rattle out this old Medicare trope.' It's BS, and it should be treated as such and called out for what it is.

Anyway, I digress. Let me be clear on this bill, the Health Legislation Amendment (Improving Choice and Transparency for Private Health Consumers) Bill 2026. The coalition supports the intent behind the bill.

We support greater transparency in healthcare pricing. We support protecting consumers from unfair premium increases. We support giving Australians the information they need to make informed decisions about their health care.

Nobody on this side of the chamber disputes those objectives. But supporting an objective and waving through legislation that is not ready to deliver that objective are two very different things, and this bill, despite being announced more than a year ago, is still not ready. Approximately 15 million Australians hold private health cover.

The private health system does not operate in isolation from our public hospitals, particularly in rural and regional Australia; it works alongside them. When the private system is strong, it relieves pressure on public hospitals. When Australians drop or downgrade their cover, they shift onto public waiting lists already under severe strain.

We're already seeing record levels of ambulance ramping and increasing waiting times at hospitals across this country. Any reform in this space carries real consequences, and those consequences must be weighed very carefully. As a result of what this government did in the budget, more than 8,000 Australians have signed my petition opposing Labor's decision to strip private health insurance rebates from older Australians, and each and every one of these people deserves to be taken seriously.

You're probably too young to remember this, Madam Deputy Speaker Garland. When I was a young lad, I remember sitting across the kitchen table from my wife. John Howard was talking about how you needed to sign up to private health insurance before you turned 30.

If you didn't, then, if you wanted to come into the private health insurance system later, you were going to pay a premium. But if you signed up before you turned 30, you'd get concessional rates for the rest of your life, provided you kept doing it. This government is now ripping that away from people aged 65 and over.

That is exactly true. At a cost of $1,600 for a couple on the gold rate, that is absolutely true. You can try to pull the wool over people's eyes, as this government tries to do all the time.

The misinformation, the mistruths, the dishonesty coming from that side of the House on everything in relation to this budget just beggars belief. Australians will need private health insurance the most when they are aged over 65. That's when they need medical assistance the most.

Now this government has changed the rules on them. They've ripped that rug from underneath them, and they are angry. My electorate is an older electorate.

They still call me 'the young fella', so it must be an older electorate. They are angry. They feel like they have been misled.

This commitment that was provided to Australians was provided by multiple governments of all varying colours, but this government is the first to breach that trust, and I've got to tell you that those pitchforks are being sharpened by the 65-and-overs. They cannot wait for the opportunity for this election to come around. But I digress.

This is exactly why the coalition supported referring this bill to the Senate Standing Committee on Community Affairs for greater scrutiny. The inquiry confirmed what we suspected: key operational details remain unresolved and the department was either unable to answer some of the bill's most fundamental questions or had not yet considered their responses. That matters because changes to the way private health insurance products are approved and changes to how specialist fees are published affect the decisions of real people and how they go about making their healthcare decisions every single day.

When legislation is poorly designed, real people bear the consequences. Schedule 1 of this bill deals with transparency by default. The bill would allow the Department of Health, Disability and Ageing to publish individual specialist fee data on the Medical Costs Finder website, drawing on Medicare hospital insurance billing data already held by government.

The coalition established the Medical Costs Finder website. We believe transparency in medical pricing is worthwhile and necessary. Australians deserve to know what they are likely to pay before they walk into a specialist's room.

But the volume of data involved here is significant and the risk of errors is a real concern. Speaking of doctors, a clinician's fees, published incorrectly on a government website, can cause immediate and potentially lasting reputational damage. Despite the government announcing these changes more than a year ago, the Senate committee received no satisfactory answers to several fundamental questions: How dated will the information on the website be at the time of publication?

How regularly will it be updated? Will clinicians be able to upload and amend their own fee information to ensure accuracy? What will the error correction process look like in practice, and will this have a quick turnaround or will it be a typically glacial response at the expense of the clinician—someone just like you, Mr Deputy Speaker Freelander?

What makes this more troubling is a provision buried in this legislation that grants the department immunity from civil liability for loss, damage or injury arising from the publication of medical fees. You heard that right. The government is holding individual clinicians to strict compliance obligations while exempting itself from equivalent accountability when things go wrong.

It is entirely appropriate that one of the country's leading paediatricians happens to be in the chair right now. Mr Deputy Speaker, this government is going to hold you and your colleagues to a different standard from the one to which it holds itself. That may cause you some consternation and may cause you to rethink my suggestion to you: that you might best serve your community by going back and being a great paediatrician.

But I'll continue. The DEPUTY SPEAKER ( Dr Freelander ): You're very kind, Member for Fisher— Mr WALLACE: I am. If you say it enough and if I say it enough, people might believe it.

The DEPUTY SPEAKER: but I am the Deputy Speaker and completely neutral on this issue. Mr WALLACE: This is a troubling double standard. You don't build in immunity provisions unless you anticipate errors.

The government appears to have accepted that it is going to make inevitable errors. Rather than designing a system robust enough to prevent reputational harm to clinicians, its preference is to protect itself from legal consequences. The parliament cannot make a fully informed decision on schedule 1 until the government provides clear answers on data currency, update frequency, clinician input mechanisms and the error correction process.

The coalition will press for those answers and seek amendments to address these gaps when this bill comes before the Senate. I turn now to schedule 2, which deals with regulating premiums. The bill would require insurers to seek ministerial approval for new products and for existing products where certain changes are proposed.

This extends the existing approval process to new products. The objective of addressing product phoenixing is one the coalition supports. Product phoenixing is the practice of closing an existing insurance product and reopening an essentially identical product at a higher premium, circumventing the requirement for premium change approval.

It's a practice that undermines the intent of premium regulation, and it harms consumers. The coalition supports closing that loophole. However, evidence presented to the Senate committee indicated that product phoenixing primarily involves gold-tier products.

These are the same people I spoke about earlier—those who are going to be paying $1,600 a year extra on their premiums if they're over 65. The bill as drafted imposes the new approval requirement broadly across all new products, including extras policies. That is a much wider net than the problem requires.

Requiring ministerial approval for every new extras policy creates red tape for insurers, with minimal consumer benefit. It risks slowing the introduction of innovative new products. The approval requirement should be targeted to the products and market behaviour actually driving the problem.

Applying it broadly is ministerial overreach, and it will generate compliance costs that will ultimately be borne by consumers. The committee also received no satisfactory answers to several critical operational questions: How many applications does the department expect to receive? Does it have the resources to process them?

Will insurers face application fees and, if so, what limit will apply? What statutory timeframes will ensure decisions are made promptly and efficiently? An insurer left waiting indefinitely for approval of a new product cannot respond to the market.

These are the practical questions any competent legislator would want answered before voting for a bill. The fact that many remain unanswered, despite a year of lead time, reflects poorly on the government's preparation. This legislation has all the hallmarks of a policy announced prematurely with critical detail never properly examined.

Fancy that. The bill's stated purpose is to improve choice and transparency for private health consumers. That goal requires honesty—fancy that—about the state of those consumers right now.

According to the government's own most recent Medicare data, the bulk-billing rate for specialist attendances is 28.2 per cent—28.2 per cent for bulk-billing for specialist attendances—with an average out-of-pocket cost, and I don't know where these figures are coming from, of $123.48. It seems pretty generous to me. For anaesthetists, the bulk-billing rate is 8.7 per cent with an average out-of-pocket cost of $244.49.

Out-of-pocket costs to see a GP have reached more than $50, the highest level on record. Research conducted by Redbridge showed that three in 10 Australians referred to a specialist did not go because they simply couldn't afford it. Australian families have been forced to choose between seeing a doctor and paying the bills.

Publishing fee information on a website, however well-designed, will not put money back into Australians pockets. It will not drive specialists to lower their fees. It may help some patients make better informed decisions, but it will not address the underlying affordability crisis.

There is also a broader issue of trust that the government appears to have overlooked. Transparency only works when consumers have confidence that the information they are receiving is complete, current and meaningful. A specialist fee published on a government website may provide part of the picture but patients are often faced with a range of costs that extend beyond a single consultation.

We're not opposing this bill. We are doing what an opposition should do. We're insisting that legislation affecting 15 million Australians and the clinicians who serve them is properly designed before it becomes law.

The government has had more than a year to work out the details of this policy. The fact that so many fundamental questions remain unanswered is not good enough. The coalition will strive to make this bill better.