Private Health Insurance Amendment (Modernising the Private Health Insurance Rebate) Bill 2026
Mr McCORMACK (Riverina) (12:42): Again, we have a situation where there is a policy area that Labor did not intimate before the election and before the budget and then brought in during that particular process—the private health insurance rebate for over-65s. If you're in that sector of society, you've done the hard yards. You've worked hard for what you have.
You've perhaps raised a family. Perhaps you've even served. But I tell you what you don't expect, and that is the government of the day then taking away something that has been in place for many years past.
In a cost-of-living crisis, it's just another body blow to those over-65s. This will leave many older Australians with a very difficult choice—with a very tough choice—and that is to cut spending on other essentials, to potentially downgrade their cover or to drop it altogether. When you're out in regional Australia and you talk to the administrators, those people who run our hospitals, they are desperately worried.
They are. They know, particularly in those private hospitals, that if people give up their private cover then the patients are going to go to the state public hospital system. If you read any report in any newspaper—or television or radio or wherever—you know that the state hospital system is already bursting at the seams.
The waiting queues are very long and they can't sustain what they have, let alone then get all those private patients of people who are over 65 who've given up their health insurance because they simply can't afford it. There we have another example of the Labor Party doing one thing before a budget and then doing another completely after the budget. It doesn't matter whether it's veterans or whatever it is, we see this all too often.
One of the real problems with this government is that it reeks of arrogance. It reeks of hubris. We saw that this morning.
It's just stopping debate. It's stopping democracy. It's stifling what we had in this place in the previous coalition governments—and that's a fair go on both sides.
This Labor Party just rams through policy and legislation without so much as even a debate. We saw it last week with the social media bills. We saw it this morning with the veteran allied healthcare cap.
What we saw over in the Senate last week was a good and rational debate over a particular policy area. Every non-government member supported what was put before the upper house, and they voted accordingly— comprehensively, resoundingly—35-20. It came back to the House of Representatives this morning and just gets kicked into the long grass, potentially never to be seen again.
Woe betide if you're a veteran who is actually over 65, because all of a sudden you've had your private health insurance affected and you've had your allied health affected. Those people just don't know where to turn. They simply don't.
It's simply not right for the government to punish older Australians by taking away the private health insurance rebate. The coalition has the team and the plan to fix these sorts of situations. We support choice.
We believe that, if people work hard to pay for private health insurance their entire working life, then this should be encouraged. What you'll find them call it on the other side is intergenerational equity. That's what they'll say.
That'll be the argument that they put forward in this debate. We're going to fight Labor's cut to the private health insurance rebate every step of the way. We're going to fight the $5,000 cap on allied health for our veterans every step of the way.
Every time that Labor comes into this place and brings down, brings through and brings up a policy that they didn't discuss before the election and that they didn't put forward before the budget, and is wrong and is not seen to be fair by Australians, we will fight it every step of the way, as the Australian public deserves. The government should scrap the proposed cut in the Private Health Insurance Amendment (Modernising the Private Health Insurance Rebate) Bill.
We heard the Treasurer quite animated this morning. I've actually never seen him quite so worked up, but he's under pressure because Labor's hurtled well and truly over a trillion dollars worth of debt. In every field of the economy, they're looking at making cuts.
Whether it's veterans or whether it's health, it doesn't matter. But they're affecting the people who are the most vulnerable. They're affecting people in the NDIS space.
They're affecting older Australians who've worked hard all their life and our veterans who have done the right thing to protect our nation and to protect our people. They deserve the very best care, and the $5,000 allied healthcare cap is affecting them very much. The Albanese government's been forced to admit that its cut to the private health insurance rebate for older Australians will place financial pressure on 1.2 million Australians—pensioners.
On its own admission, the department doesn't have a reliable up-to-date count, despite the health minister announcing the $11 billion tax grab way back, even prior to the budget. We know that there's a mistake. We know that this is the wrong thing to do.
We know that Labor is just turning a blind eye to the needs and wants and expectations and demands of Australians, particularly older Australians. But, rest assured, when those older Australians vote, they will remember this. They will remember how they've been betrayed by this Labor government, which has never seen a cut that it doesn't like to make.