Shadow Portfolio — 1 July 2026

Melissa McIntosh used two second-reading amendments on 1 July to run a coordinated opposition attack across health and online safety — accepting the government's legislative vehicles while using each to document what she framed as policy failure under Labor.

On health, McIntosh introduced the Health Insurance Amendment (Incentive Payments and Other Measures) Bill 2026 and signalled the coalition will not oppose it in the House, while simultaneously moving an amendment that accused the government of breaking its central health promise [TA-260629-house-2aa448864ab1:s085]. The bill codifies four existing incentive payment programs — the General Practice in Aged Care Incentive, the Bulk Billing Practice Incentive, the Practice Incentives Program, and the Workforce Incentive Program — into a single legislative framework with consistent compliance and oversight mechanisms.

The coalition has referred the bill to the Senate Community Affairs Legislation Committee for further scrutiny, preserving its capacity to seek amendments in the upper house.

The political weight of the intervention, however, lay in the amendment's factual indictment of bulk-billing performance. McIntosh cited a fall in the bulk-billing rate from 88.5% in May 2022 to 77.9%, a 21% rise in average out-of-pocket GP costs to $50.77 per visit, and a drop of 1.8 million GP attendances — each statistic directed at the Prime Minister's promise of universal bulk-billing [TA-260629-house-2aa448864ab1:s085].

She sharpened the geographic dimension by citing Tasmania's average GP cost of $59.54 and the Clark electorate's $64.20, and placed the cumulative burden on households at over $2 billion in out-of-pocket expenses in the past financial year [TA-260629-house-2aa448864ab1:s085]. The downstream consequence she drew was overcrowded emergency departments — linking GP access failure directly to hospital system pressure.

On online safety, McIntosh moved a second-reading amendment to the Online Safety Amendment (Strengthening Enforcement for the Social Media Minimum Age) Bill 2026, again supporting passage while attacking the government's record [TA-260630-house-1314b1cdbe60:s012]. The coalition's position anchors on the Online Safety Act 2021 as its own legislative achievement; McIntosh characterised the current government's social-media age-restriction rules as poorly designed and badly implemented, arguing they compromise children's safety rather than protect it [TA-260630-house-1314b1cdbe60:s012].

She described the government's proposed digital duty of care as ill-defined and unexplained to the public, and framed the bill's doubling of the maximum penalty to $99 million as an admission that earlier enforcement settings had failed.

The evidentiary centrepiece was a British Medical Journal study McIntosh cited showing 85% of under-16s still access social media, reinforced by an eSafety Commissioner update indicating 70% of children remain on platforms [TA-260630-house-1314b1cdbe60:s012]. Her conclusion — that the age ban will not improve adolescent mental health — is the sharpest challenge to the government's central justification for the law.

The coalition's stated alternative focuses on stronger enforcement under the 2021 framework, parental safety tools, and action against addictive algorithms.

The two amendments follow the same structural logic: the coalition accepts the government's bills as broadly supportable, then uses the amendment mechanism to enter into the Hansard record a set of measurable claims about government underperformance. In health, the attack is on a broken promise with quantified affordability data. In online safety, the attack is on implementation failure backed by independent research.

Together they establish a day's messaging that the government legislates but does not deliver.