Andrew Wallace
Fisher · Liberal National Party · Australia
“Based on that meeting, I worked pretty closely with the former shadow minister for communications David Coleman, and I was the chair of the Social Policy and Legal Affairs Committee when, with the member for Newcastle, we held an inquiry into protecting the age of innocence.”
“On 3 January 2018, Dolly Everett passed away at the age of 14. She was a young woman, a young lady, who had been bullied mercilessly. Sadly, she took her own life as a result of the bullying she encountered on social media. That happened not long into my parliamentary term in this place.”
“Later, in June 2024, the then opposition leader Peter Dutton pledged that a coalition government would implement a ban on social media for under-16s within 100 days of taking office. The Labor government did not introduce a bill to protect under-16s from social media until 12 months after we introduced our private member's bill.”
“It was the coalition that consistently led the charge on the protection of children. We actually set up the eSafety Commissioner—and what we now know, from the eSafety Commissioner herself, is that 70 per cent of children are still on social media as a result of this government's flawed legislation.”
“The continuity, the trust and the prevention that a good family GP, like my doctor in Maroochydore, provides cannot be replicated by a clipboard and a six-minute timer. That is where the human cost begins to accumulate. Bulk-billing has collapsed under this government, no matter what those opposite say or how they try and spin it.”
“For decades, Commonwealth governments, including coalition governments, have used health incentive payments to support quality care, to encourage digital health adoption, to sustain general practice in aged-care settings and to keep doctors working in rural and remote communities, where the economics of medicine are hard and the distances…”
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“It was the coalition that consistently led the charge on the protection of children. We actually set up the eSafety Commissioner—and what we now know, from the eSafety Commissioner herself, is that 70 per cent of children are still on social media as a result of this government's flawed legislation. So you will excuse us if the opposition say we don't trust the government to get this next tranche right. That's why we are saying that this legislation needs to follow the usual course. It needs to go to a Senate inquiry because we don't trust that Labor have got this right. The government stuffed it up last time. Chances are it will continue to stuff it up again. (Time expired)”
“Later, in June 2024, the then opposition leader Peter Dutton pledged that a coalition government would implement a ban on social media for under-16s within 100 days of taking office. The Labor government did not introduce a bill to protect under-16s from social media until 12 months after we introduced our private member's bill. The Prime Minister was dragged, kicking and screaming—you can shake your head; you probably weren't even here then—to introduce a bill 12 months later. The Prime Minister has made a big fanfare, and those members opposite try to rewrite history. But the reality is that history has always been on the side of the coalition when it comes to the protection of children. We established the Australian Centre to Counter Child Exploitation.”
“Based on that meeting, I worked pretty closely with the former shadow minister for communications David Coleman, and I was the chair of the Social Policy and Legal Affairs Committee when, with the member for Newcastle, we held an inquiry into protecting the age of innocence. Some of the recommendations in the report from the inquiry called for an age restriction for pornography and gambling. The member for Newcastle would remember this well. It was a well-respected inquiry. Fast forward to November 2023, when the then shadow minister for communications David Coleman—we'd lost government by that stage—introduced a private member's bill that required the government to conduct a trial for age verification technology on pornography and social media platforms. That bill was not supported by the government.”
“On 3 January 2018, Dolly Everett passed away at the age of 14. She was a young woman, a young lady, who had been bullied mercilessly. Sadly, she took her own life as a result of the bullying she encountered on social media. That happened not long into my parliamentary term in this place. As a result of Dolly's passing, I travelled down to Sydney and held a meeting with all of the social media companies that were presently in existence, or the main ones anyway, as well as Google and Microsoft. I walked out of that meeting with the express understanding that I had just spent the last two hours or so with big tobacco in the late 2000s. These companies gave me every reason under the sun for why they were protecting young lives—which was all rubbish, and we all know that.”
“Anyone who tells you otherwise is fooling themselves, but complexity is precisely why discipline matters. The coalition's record is one of managing the nation's finances as though they were our own. And if we are given that opportunity again, we will be very careful with the Australian taxpayers' dollars, unlike this government.”
“Under this government, under Prime Minister Albanese, we have seen the sharpest decline in living standards across the OECD, the sharpest decline in living standards, driven by energy bills this government promised to bring down. Higher rents, higher electricity bills, higher gas bills, higher insurance bills—you name it; it has gone up. The Smith Family tells us nine in 10 low-income families now worry they can't afford to put school shoes on their kids' feet. That's not bad luck. It's not an unavoidable global headwind. This is the cumulative weight of bad choices by a bad government made one after the other after the other and felt savagely by people least able to absorb them. Government is not simple. I know that. We've done it. It's complex; it's hard.”
“And the deeming rate changes have just cut his pension instead of lifting it. John says he'll cope by cutting back on dining out. That doesn't just hurt John; it hurts the cafe down the road, and it turns John's retirement into survival. Let me tell you about Helen and David, who wrote to me. They worked. They paid their taxes. They did everything they were asked to do. Now, they're telling me that every bill eats into the savings they spent a lifetime building. Their message to me was simple. 'Don't drop the ball; we need you,' they said. The Australia Institute found that over half of Australians say their household is worse off than just two years ago. For those on fixed incomes, that number climbs higher still.”
“Patricia kept her private health insurance after she lost her husband because she believed it would protect her. Despite being a pensioner, she sacrificed what she could to afford her private health insurance. She recently used the Sunshine Coast University Hospital and voluntarily claimed through her insurer, returning more than $6,000 to Queensland Health. That's the kind of citizen Patricia is. Under this government's rebate changes, she now stands to lose more than $1,000 a year for the privilege of doing the right thing. But here's the thing: thanks to the cost of living not being a priority for this government, Patricia doesn't have $1,000 to spare. Her choices are bleak. Now, I want to tell you about John. He's 68, renting in Golden Beach. He just had a rent increase of 60 bucks a week.”
“The cost of living is affecting all Australians. For some, it's a death by a thousand cuts. Rarely is it the cruelty of a single brutal decision that everyone could see and oppose. It's the cruelty of endless poor decisions and bad policies, each one small enough to wave through, each one defended by the government as maybe modest, maybe reasonable, maybe even incremental. And then, one day, an Australian sits down at their kitchen table, adds it all up and realises there's nothing left to give and nowhere left to turn. They realise, hopefully, that it's actually not them; it's this Labor government. That is what incrementalism does. Most people don't really notice it until it's too late. It's like the frog in the boiling pot. I want to tell you about Patricia, a retired widow from Dicky Beach.”
“They are evidence of a plan to drive out independent family doctors and hand the system to corporate interests, running production line six-minute medicine—high volume, low continuity and fast throughput. As I said earlier, there has been a 21 per cent increase in GP out-of-pocket costs in two years, a bulk-billing rate that's collapsed by almost 11 percentage points, 1.8 million fewer GP consultations and $2 billion paid by Australian families who were told they would only need a Medicare card. The Australian people deserve a health system that is sustainable, that's affordable and that keeps faith with the promises made to earn their trust. We will continue to support Medicare and the health of Australians.”
“These doctors, these practices, are already under significant strain from the rising cost of doing business under this government—wages, rent, insurance, equipment and a growing mountain of compliance demands. The last thing they need is political intimidation from their own government. Instead of sending heavy-handed letters to local doctors, this government should focus on fixing the crisis it created, from record out-of-pocket costs to growing emergency department wait times and workforce shortages spreading through general practice. Those letters also reveal something more troubling about the direction this government intends to take.”
“The letters are designed to pressure them, to lean on them, to bully them into bulk-billing so that the government could paper over the gap between its solemn promise and its catastrophic performance. This is a disgrace. Let's be clear about who runs these practices. They are small businesses. I know this because I speak with them regularly in my own electorate of Fisher. They are bowing under the pressure. They are the backbone of local communities. They are owned and staffed by doctors who have spent a lifetime getting to know their patients, who track a child's development across years, who manage a pensioner's medication regime, who sit with someone while they receive a difficult diagnosis.”
“There was a time when the promise of Medicare was simple and it was kept. You felt unwell, you went to your doctor and you were seen. Prevention was possible because access was affordable. That chain—that simple chain of cause and care—is broken. It is not fair, and it sits in direct contradiction to a promise made 71 times to the people of this country. But it is what came next that revealed the true character of this government. Confronted with the wreckage of its broken promise, the Albanese government did not acknowledge reality. It did not course-correct. It reached instead for intimidation. I understand that some Labor MPs have begun sending threatening letters to family-run GP practices.”
“Australians are being asked to absorb years of record costs and declining access. It is simply not good enough. The Medicare statistics make the human cost impossible to ignore. The number of GP consultations has fallen by more than 1.8 million, compared with the same period the previous year. That's 1.8 million missed opportunities for health care. That is older Australians deferring a check-up, parents putting off a visit for a sick child and workers dismissing chest pain or a mental health concern because they know there's a gap waiting for them and they are not sure if they can cover it. We all know what deferred care becomes. It becomes emergency department presentations. It becomes avoidable hospitalisation. It becomes preventable suffering. It is not good policy and it is certainly not good economics.”
“The continuity, the trust and the prevention that a good family GP, like my doctor in Maroochydore, provides cannot be replicated by a clipboard and a six-minute timer. That is where the human cost begins to accumulate. Bulk-billing has collapsed under this government, no matter what those opposite say or how they try and spin it. Let's have a look at the facts. When the coalition left office in May 2022, the national bulk-billing rate stood at 88.5 per cent, an all-time record high. Under Labor, it has fallen to as low as 77.9 per cent, a drop of almost 11 percentage points. That is not a fluctuation at the margins or a temporary dip; that is a collapse. The Department of Health, Disability and Ageing has already conceded that this government will not meet its own bulk-billing targets until after the next election at the earliest.”
“High volume, low continuity, fast throughput—it's a conveyor belt, where the patient is a number and the consultation is just a transaction and where the practice that managed your parents through their final years has been replaced by a corporate clinic that books six-minute slots and measures success in throughput, not outcomes. That's the future that this prime minister is building, whether he admits it or not. When you drive out the independent family doctor through underfunding, through regulatory pressure, through threatening letters designed to coerce rather than support, you don't get a better system. You get a hollowed-out one. You get medicine that is cheaper to deliver and more expensive for the country to sustain.”
“Practice owners—people who built their clinics from nothing, who have served their communities for decades—are telling me they cannot hold the line any longer. Many GPs are getting older, like us all, but GPs in particular are. I know many GPs, and many of them are on the wrong side of 60. They've worked damn hard all their lives, and they're tired. They didn't go into medicine to turn patients away, but the economics that this government has created are making that choice for them. If clinics survive, what then?”
“In a growing area like mine, you're not going to get 370,000 people visiting one urgent care clinic. My people feel the calculation forming in the backs of their minds: 'Can I afford these out-of-pocket costs? Is it worth it? Can I wait another week? Can I wait another month?' And we all know what happens when people delay medical treatment. At my mobile offices across Fisher, the conversations are consistent, and they are heartbreaking. Mothers with young kids are telling me that they've delayed taking a sick child to the doctor because they could not find a bulk-billing practice and could not cover the gap. Elderly constituents, many of them on fixed incomes, are rationing their visits, skipping follow-ups, managing worsening conditions at home, because $60 is $60 when you're on a pension. Some wait; some don't go at all.”
“Two billion dollars—that's money taken from grocery budgets, from mortgage repayments, from school fees, from power bills, redirected to pay the gap at the surgery, because the Prime Minister promised that a Medicare card would be enough though we all know it is not. The variation across the country is stark, and it's damning. In my own electorate of Fisher, people struggle to find a bulk-billing GP, and money out of pocket means elevated stress for someone already unwell. Yes, we have just opened up an urgent care clinic in Little Mountain. That's great—one urgent care clinic for an electorate that has over 150,000 people! If you include the entire Sunshine Coast, it's 370-odd thousand people. And, when you're paying $60 to see your GP, you do not feel like the only thing you need is your Medicare card.”
“We have moved a second reading amendment because this parliament must confront in plain language what this government has presided over. Average out-of-pocket costs for GP non-referred attendances have hit a record high of $50.77 per service nationally, covering July to December 2025, up from $46.31 the previous year and up from $41.90 the year before—a 21 per cent increase in just two years. For a family with children, for an older Australian managing a chronic condition, for a worker who cannot ignore a symptom any longer—21 per cent more, simply to walk through the door of their family doctor. In the past financial year alone, Australian families paid over $2 billion—that's 'billion' with a 'b'—in combined GP out-of-pocket costs.”
“It's Mediscare. They do it every time. The coalition is committed to Medicare. I'm committed to Medicare. The bill creates consistent processes for program approval and variation. It clarifies decision-making and review. It allows the Secretary of the Department of Health, Disability and Ageing and the Chief Executive Medicare to take compliance action with respect to providers. In principle, these are sensible housekeeping measures. Doctors and practices deserve a clear and stable legislative framework. The coalition won't oppose the bill, but we have referred it to the Senate Community Affairs Legislation Committee for proper scrutiny because you can never trust this government for what little pearls they might sneak into their legislation.”
“For decades, Commonwealth governments, including coalition governments, have used health incentive payments to support quality care, to encourage digital health adoption, to sustain general practice in aged-care settings and to keep doctors working in rural and remote communities, where the economics of medicine are hard and the distances are great. The Bulk Billing Practice Incentive Program, the General Practice in Aged Care Incentive, the Workforce Incentive Program—these are not new inventions of this government. They are tools that my side of politics, that this side of the House, built, refined and expanded, because we understood—the coalition understood—that Medicare rebates alone are not enough. Every election, the Labor Party roll out these old tropes about the coalition not supporting Medicare. It's absolute rubbish.”
“But the story of how we arrived here, of what this government has done to the health system it was entrusted to protect—it's that story that demands to be told. This bill was presented by a prime minister who made a promise not once, not twice—not in the fine print of a policy document, buried beneath the footnote—but 71 times. We all remember it. The Prime Minister told the Australian people 71 times that all they needed was their Medicare card, not a credit card. We all remember him holding up and waving around that green card. That promise is in tatters. Let me first deal with what this legislation actually does and why the coalition supports its intent.”
“This bill, the Health Insurance Amendment (Incentive Payments and Other Measures) Bill 2026, has a simple purpose, but it has a deeply uncomfortable story. The simple purpose is to establish a clear legislative framework for Commonwealth health incentive payment programs. They're programs that have for many years been administered without adequate legislative cover for their administration, for their compliance and for their oversight—programs like the General Practice in Aged Care Incentive, the Bulk Billing Practice Incentive Program, the Practice Incentives Program and the Workforce Incentive Program. Putting these on a sound statutory footing is sensible, it's overdue, and the coalition will not oppose the bill in the House.”
“They described clients who believed that they'd done everything asked of them only to have the goalposts not just moved but put into another suburb. One adviser shared the remarks from one of his clients. The client said, 'I left communist China to get away from this.' This view speaks to how many Australians fear government is increasingly willing to tax aspiration, savings and success. At the small-business forum I heard similar concerns. These hardworking mums and dads are not asking for special treatment; they're asking for breathing space, for government to get out of their way and let them do what they do best—and that's run their business with some degree of certainty. But, at the moment, this government is offering nothing but uncertainty.”
“At my Fisher budget forum, residents questioned whether government would still honour its side of the bargain if Australians do the right thing—save, invest, work hard and plan for the future. That concern was particularly strong among retirees. Many had spent decades making responsible financial decisions so they would not become dependent on the government. Now they see private health insurance rebates being cut, new taxes on investments and retirement plans thrown into uncertainty. These are real people, and many have lost all trust in this government. More than 8½ thousand people have signed my petition about the government's private health insurance rebate cuts. That's how angry they are about this. I then met with local financial planning professionals. Their assessment was sobering.”
“Over recent weeks, I've been listening to people across my electorate of Fisher through community forums, roundtable discussions and local conversations. Three engagements in particular have stood out: a budget forum with residents, a roundtable with financial planners and a small-business forum with local business owners. Despite their different backgrounds, constituents delivered remarkably similar messages. They feel they are working harder, paying more and getting less under this Labor government. People in my electorate of Fisher feel the rules changed after they made decisions based on promises by governments over many years, and they are increasingly concerned about the direction of our country. In a recent survey I did, 70 per cent of respondents felt that this country was heading in the wrong direction.”
“The Labor Party wanted nothing to do with it. That was until a group of parents who had lost children to the sort of abuse that many children experience on social media—mums like Emma Mason, who lost her daughter Matilda to the most wicked forms of online abuse. Mr Deputy Speaker, when you and I were lads—you were a lad a fair bit longer ago than I was a lad.”
“The social media ban for under-16-year-olds was a coalition conviction. It was a coalition policy born out of the good work that we did on the Standing Committee on Social Policy and Legal Affairs. In 2023, in November, there was a coalition private member's bill—which, if I remember correctly, was moved by then shadow minister David Coleman—to force age verification onto the agenda for social media, and Labor knocked it back. This Labor government knocked it back. This Labor government has been dragged kicking and screaming to introduce a social media ban. Those members opposite will try and rewrite history, especially those members opposite who are new to the party or new to this place and who are given the talking points by the Labor Party. But the reality is the under-16s ban was born of and from the coalition.”
“You and I both sat on that inquiry of the Standing Committee on Social Policy and Legal Affairs, which I chaired, and you named the report Protecting the age of innocence . I'll be forever grateful for the work that you and I did because that really kicked off in this parliament the importance of age assurance. In that inquiry, we looked at restricting, with an effort to eliminating, online pornography and gambling for under 18-year-olds, and we wanted to introduce that age assurance. That was the first time that this place had considered that, and, unfortunately, still today, in 2026, those recommendations have not been fully implemented. I lament that. It is very unfortunate that those two issues of online pornography and online gambling for under-18s are still not properly looked after. But I digress.”
“Not only did we create the Children's eSafety Commissioner in 2015; in 2017 we built the world's first scheme to force platforms to take down intimate images shared without consent, which is sometimes referred to as revenge pawn, and hit perpetrators and non-compliant platforms with real financial penalties. In 2021, the coalition introduced and passed the Online Safety Act. It was the most comprehensive online safety regime in the nation's history. We codified the basic online safety expectations, created an adult cyberabuse take-down scheme and slashed the time platforms have to strip illegal and terrorist content from their feeds. This wasn't window dressing, Mr Deputy Speaker. This was real reform.”
“There's an old phrase that goes something like this: you can always judge the state of a society by how it treats its most vulnerable. The issues that we have looked at together, Mr Deputy Speaker, over a number of years, with the harms that are being caused by social media to young people, are very significant. When the coalition was in government, we led the charge on things such as the implementation of the eSafety Commissioner. When the eSafety Commissioner was first introduced, the role was actually called the Children's eSafety Commissioner, and then the coalition expanded the role across all age groups because we recognised that, unfortunately, bad things were happening online.”
“Unfortunately, the Labor members have all just departed the chamber. It is unfortunate because they could have actually learned something. Between you, Mr Deputy Speaker Freelander, and me, with our experience in this particular area, we could teach them a lesson. But the Online Safety Amendment (Strengthening Enforcement for the Social Media Minimum Age) Bill 2026 is a very important bill, and it's one that I know that you have a great deal of interest in, because you and I have worked very closely together over the years on the protection of young people. No government has any greater responsibility than the protection of its citizens. Drilling down into that even further, that is particularly so when we talk about the protection of its most vulnerable—that is, children.”
“Now they're reaching into the pockets of widows, widowers and divorcees. Life has already dealt them a very tough hand. Labor shouldn't be making it harder for them. Labor can't manage the nation's finances, so they keep coming after everyday Australians. The coalition believes that Australians should be rewarded for hard work, not punished for it. We'll continue to fight these toxic taxes. We'll stand up for families, retirees, small businesses, widows, widowers and divorcees, and we'll keep fighting for a fairer, freer, better Australia.”
“Last night, Labor failed a very simple test. They had the opportunity to stand with Australians who've already endured some of life's greatest challenges—widows, widowers, divorcees and families trying to rebuild after loss and hardship. Instead, Labor voted to increase their taxes. Can you believe it? That tells Australians everything they need to know about an incompetent government that cannot tell the truth. Before the election, Labor promised Australians that they wouldn't come after their savings, their investments or their future. But once those votes were counted those promises disappeared into thin air. This government keeps talking about fairness while punishing Australians who've worked hard, saved hard and planned responsibly. First, it was toxic taxes on housing, investment and aspiration.”
“This lot—these economic geniuses on the other side of the House—want to reintroduce them. Seriously, we've read this book before; we know how it ends. This government has betrayed the Australian people. We will fight these toxic taxes every single step of the way to the next election.”
“This is the housing market screaming out to the Labor Party: 'Stop what you are doing. You are killing confidence in the housing sector.' House prices are falling, and the housing minister seems to be quite happy about this. But at what point will she be happy for it to stop? What's a reasonable house price drop? Is it five per cent, 10 per cent, 15 per cent or 20 per cent? We are seeing developers exiting the market because they can't make a property deal stack up under these new tax laws. What happens when you reduce supply and you have a high demand? Rents will go up. We saw this in the eighties under Prime Minister Keating when he tried these changes to negative gearing. It lasted less than two years before he scrapped those changes. He scrapped them.”
“Over the last couple of weeks, I've been out talking to many people in my electorate. I've held lots of different forums. You haven't heard much of this government's catchphrases 'intergenerational fairness' or 'intergenerational equity' because it went down like a pork chop at a kosher wedding, particularly with young people. Young people know that this government is trying to pull the wool over their eyes. They are. This is nothing other than a rank tax grab. Now we are seeing a situation where, before our very eyes, the prices of houses are falling. We are seeing significant drops in auction clearance rates, the lowest since the pandemic. Do you know what the auction clearance rate was in Brisbane last weekend? It was 33 per cent. In Melbourne and Sydney, it was around 45 per cent—a tick under. But, in Brisbane, it was 33 per cent.”
“This is the greatest act of betrayal a government has committed on the Australian people in Australian political history. Almost every day this week, I have stood up in this chamber and talked about the fact that this government is the most socialist government this country has ever seen. I've seen those eyebrows of the Speaker raised, but that is the reality. That is the reality of the dirty, grubby deals that have been done by this government and the Greens and now the teals. This wealth redistribution, this constant pushing down and punching down on the Australian people—this government's approach is a lowest common denominator approach. It doesn't want anybody to succeed. How can young Australians create wealth after this government has pulled up the ladder on them? How are they going to do it?”
“This afternoon, we witnessed an appalling act of betrayal from this government on 28 million Australians. I think on the morning after the budget the vast majority of Australians woke up with buyer's remorse, regretting the fact that they voted in an Anthony Albanese-led government, because this is a government that says one thing but does exactly the opposite. The Prime Minister promised Australians that there'd be no changes to superannuation, no changes to CGT, no changes to negative gearing and no changes to trusts. Yet, just a few short weeks and months afterwards, this government rammed through a bill today with the assistance of the Greens and a number of the teals that will significantly alter the wealth of everyday Australians.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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?”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”