SENATOR ANNE RUSTON
SHADOW MINISTER FOR HEALTH AND AGED CARE
DEPUTY LEADER OF THE OPPOSITION IN THE SENATE
SENATOR FOR SOUTH AUSTRALIA
BEN SMALL MP
FEDERAL MEMBER FOR FORREST
SHADOW ASSISTANT MINISTER FOR INFRASTRUCTURE
SHADOW ASSISTANT MINISTER FOR ELECTORAL MATTERS
OPPOSITION WHIP
TRANSCRIPT
JOINT PRESS CONFERENCE - REINSTATE THE REBATE
Topics: Labor’s cuts to Private Health, Migration
Tuesday 06/10/26
STARTS
Ben Small MP:
Okay, well look, it's been fantastic to have the Shadow Health Minister Anne Ruston here in Bunbury joining a group of concerned locals who feel attacked, basically, as they're getting older in life. This mean and nasty measure from the Albanese Government is hitting their hip pockets right at the time where they can't actually afford to generate extra income. We're talking about over-65s who shouldn't be forced to go and get a side hustle because they have done the right thing and maintained private health insurance cover for some decades. In fact, this morning we met someone who'd had private health insurance for 52 years. That's an Australian who's done the right thing, done what every government has asked of them until this one has decided to go after them. With that, I'll throw to Anne.
Senator Anne Ruston:
Yeah, look, thanks. It's fantastic to be here in Bunbury. What a beautiful town and beautiful community that you've got. I'm just very sorry I've got to head back east, I'd rather stay here.
But look, it was fantastic to hear from locals this morning and I've been travelling around the country, visiting every state and territory to speak to the local community about what the impact of this decision by the Federal Government to cut the additional rebate for people over the age of 65 to maintain their private health insurance.
But the thing that the government doesn't tell you is that whilst they are booking a saving to their own budget bottom line, the cost to older Australians, but also to the state and territory governments, will wipe out that saving overnight. The government has a report of its own that has been provided to it that says for every dollar that is taken out of the private health insurance rebate, it will cost $1.20. So this measure has got a 20 per cent premium on it and it will cost 20 per cent more.
So this is tricky accounting behaviour by the Albanese Government to try and fix up Jim Chalmers' budget bottom line that he has messed up in every other area.
A couple of other points. The government keeps talking about this as intergenerational equity. Well, I say to you that if somebody has had private health insurance for 52 years, and I had some gentleman the other day who'd had private health insurance for 73 years, if you've been paying your health insurance for 73 years and you've not drawn on it, and now at a time when you're likely to need it, it's being taken away from you, that's not intergenerational inequity, that's actually just plainly cruel.
And also, if you take away this rebate and older Australians end up in the public system, who pays for the public system? Taxpayers. By their very nature, taxpayers are younger Australians.
By every measure, this policy is a bad policy. It will not generate the savings the government believes that it will, and the Coalition will fight all the way, well hopefully next week we'll get it knocked out of the Parliament. But if we're unsuccessful in knocking it out of the Parliament, we will fight this measure all the way to the next election because we believe older Australians who've built this country, paid taxes all their life, paid their private health insurance all their life, deserve better than a government that's basically declared war on them and sees them as a cash cow to fix up their budget bottom line.
Reporter:
What are some of the concerns you're hearing from residents?
Senator Anne Ruston:
I think there are two key concerns.
One is the older Australians who say, "We just simply can't afford to keep our health insurance anymore", and they're worried that they're going to end up on an already overburdened public system. They'll end up on wait lists that are years long to be able to get a joint replacement or cataract surgery, which we know older Australians rely on very heavily. So they're very worried that they're going to end up there and they're not going to be able to get the treatment.
They are so fearful of losing their private health, and this government is relying on that anxiety and fear that older Australians will keep their private health so that they can actually make this saving.
So they're the two stories that we're hearing, and both of them are tragic, that older Australians should be put into the situation to make that sort of decision.
Ben Small MP:
And I think it's also really acute for regional communities like the South West because, on top of facing increasing health needs as you get older, regional people need to travel. With fuel pushing $3 a litre, going to Perth for a medical appointment is suddenly becoming an expensive undertaking. So it's hit after hit after hit from this government presiding over an absolute debacle here. And of course older Australians watch the news. They know that month on month Western Australia is setting new records for ambulance ramping. Older Australians are being left in hospital corridors for sometimes 48 hours in Perth. The public health system in this state is crumbling, and the idea of putting extra pressure on it from people being forced out of the private health system at this time is just a disaster waiting to happen.
Reporter:
The government said that the savings from the change will be reinvested into aged care. What are your thoughts on that?
Senator Anne Ruston:
Well, if the government is such bad economic managers that somehow they have got to rob the health system to pay for the aged care system, then my question to the government is: what are you doing?
It is an outrageous proposition that a government can't afford to support older Australians in aged care and support our health system. There are plenty of other places this government could be going to find the necessary funding to support aged care and health. For a start, they could deal with their government waste. They could stop with all the bureaucracies that they're building everywhere to deal with issues that are nowhere near as important as supporting Australians in their health needs and supporting older Australians through their healthcare needs as well.
Ben Small MP:
The Albanese Government has declared war on older Australians, and that was exposed through their own spending priorities. They spent $16 billion in a one-off election bribe taking 20 per cent off HECS debts for young people before the election. And now this mean and nasty policy is aimed at saving a billion dollars a year at best and as Anne Ruston just explained, it is unlikely to do so because people are being forced into the state system, public system at greater cost.
So that just lets bells the cat here. The government has declared war on older Australians, and they are pitching one generation against another. It's a disgrace.
Reporter:
What are your concerns for people here in the South West?
Ben Small MP:
Look, I think the concerns here in the South West are exactly what we're hearing across the country, and that's that people expect that where they do the right thing, they've invested in their own healthcare in some cases for decades, that the government would respect that at the time they are approaching the next phase of their life and they're unable to earn extra income, the last thing they should be facing is a mean and nasty hit to their private health insurance costs and that's what this is.
Reporter:
Just on today's migration announcement…
Reporter:
Sorry. I know you've travelled here today. What made you come to Bunbury to talk about this as opposed to somewhere else?
Senator Anne Ruston:
Well, I'm going anywhere anybody invites me, and Ben invited me down so I'm here, I mean yesterday I was in Canning in Mandurah with Andrew Hastie. Two weeks ago I was in Perth and in other electorates. I will go to any electorate that invites me to go, and I'm going to some that don't even invite me to go because I want to hear from every single state and territory, metropolitan, rural, regional and remote, because this is actually impacting differently depending on where you actually live.
In the city areas it is a completely different story than in regional areas. We're seeing in some regional areas that if their private hospital is no longer viable because they're not having the kind of demand on their services, they may well close down and a regional community often only has one private service. If that private service is gone, there is no private service left at all. In the cities maybe you can go and find another one.
We're already seeing it, and Ben explained to me that there's no maternity service left in this community. That's the kind of thing that we're going to start seeing right across the country if we see a diminishing in the number of people holding private health insurance.
Ben Small MP:
We're having to grease the hinges on my office door every week now because the volume of traffic coming through the front door with concerns about private health insurance, the state of our aged care system and indeed our public hospitals is so acute in the South West community. I couldn't pass up the opportunity to have Anne Ruston come here as our Shadow Health Minister and hear directly from locals because whether it's in 12 or 18 months time when we go to the ballot box next, we need to have a compelling case for change that reassures Australians their health system will be there when they need it.
Senator Anne Ruston:
Well, obviously the details of the policy are something that the Shadow Minister for Home Affairs will be speaking about.
In terms of the specific details, one of the things that I would say this policy is very focused on is making sure that the target of our migration policy is around the skills that Australia needs in order for us to continue to build our economy and our country. One of the most important issues that we have heard through our consultation on the development of this policy has been that rural and regional Australia, particularly when it comes to the agricultural workforce, is a very big driver.
So we will reintroduce, as we have always promised over the last four years, an agriculture-specific visa to make sure that our rural and regional communities and our agricultural sector are supported with the workforce that they need in order to get their crops off and get their products to market.
Reporter:
And as Shadow Health Minister, how many additional doctors, nurses and allied health workers would this policy deliver to regional communities and how will you ensure they actually work outside capital cities?
Senator Anne Ruston:
Look, it's a really important question about making sure that we have got a health workforce that is actually covering the whole country because we know right now that your postcode determines the access that you get to healthcare.
The policy that's been released this morning absolutely prioritises health workforce, including domestically trained workforce as well as overseas-trained workforce because, while it would be great if we could train all of our health workforce in this country, we know that's not the case at the moment. But one of the things that this government has done progressively over the last four years is constantly cut all the initiatives that the Coalition had put in place to prioritise workforce into rural and regional areas. They have destroyed the Distribution Priority Area Network, which means that there is no longer a great advantage for doctors to work in rural and regional areas.
So we are absolutely focused on making sure that our policies that we take to the next election are not determined by your postcode and If you live here in Bunbury, you've got just as much chance of getting access to healthcare as you do if you're in downtown Sydney.
Reporter:
And are you...
Ben Small MP:
Such a polite press pack, this is so rare.
Reporter:
I know you said that agricultural workers will be protected, but over the next four years if there was, was it a reduction of around 650,000 people, how can growers be assured that that's not going to impact them?
Ben Small MP:
Can I have a swing at this?
Look, I've been talking about the need to get our migration system under control since before I was elected to Parliament. So it shouldn't come as a shock to South West residents that the party I'm part of has proudly unveiled a system to control our migration arrangements once more because the numbers have been too high and the standards have been too low.
We're seeking to address both of those, but in a way that doesn't cripple the economy. Only the Liberal Party and its policy actually understands that. That's why the consultation has been months long, the assessment has been rigorous and the analysis by the Parliamentary Budget Office confirms that our migration policy won't tank the economy.
In the South West here we are so dependent on temporary skills from migration, whether it be to get grapes off at vintage time, to keep our red meat processors online, or indeed the highly specialised skills that keep our alumina refineries producing. So, this policy today actually rebalances our migration system towards the skills that we need, away from people who are treating Australia like a campground, not a country.
We're closing the visa loopholes that stop people hopping from one program to another. We're essentially ensuring that the 77,000 people who have no legal right to be in this country any longer are removed from Australia as quickly as practicable and that we see that link between housing completions and the migration system going forward because we can't welcome people to a country that has nowhere to house them.
So I think these are really sensible announcements today, they reflect the needs of the South West economy and I'm very proud of them.
So rather than having our universities selling degrees that really represent visa pathways, they should be selling quality education. That's what we've seen in our policy today, which will cut the number of students coming to Australia but actually see an uptick in the number of skilled migrants coming to our country.
Reporter:
Just on that, you're proposing to abolish temporary graduate visas. Why should an overseas-trained nurse, teacher or skilled graduate already living and studying in regional Australia potentially have to leave the country before applying to return as a skilled worker?
Ben Small MP:
What we're seeing is the tertiary system exploited by people who seek to come to Australia and stay here, hopping from one visa program to another to another. Ultimately, that loophole needs to be closed.
So where graduates come to Australia, study in an Australian university and earn a qualification, they would then be welcome to apply under our skilled migration program for a vacancy that suits their skills and qualifications. They need to do that from overseas because we are closing the loophole that means second and subsequent applications are being made onshore.
It actually aligns us with many countries around the world because let's not forget our migration system is a privilege by which people are welcomed to Australia.
We are unashamedly putting Australians first through this policy today and that's why we've taken the bold step I think of closing that loophole for graduates.
Reporter:
Just back on aged care, what do you think of the back and forth between the State and Federal Governments over older patients taking up hospital beds?
Senator Anne Ruston:
Look, it is an incredibly big issue and I know that the Western Australian Government has been speaking to the Federal Government about coming up with some solutions.
What we're saying to the Federal Government is that you need to prioritise people who are stuck in hospital, who are medically fit for discharge simply because they can't get access to an aged care home or they're not being allocated an aged care package. These people need to be prioritised, right now under the current government, they are not being prioritised and the Federal Government seems quite happy for these older Australians to be left in a hospital bed, which is not only the most expensive place for them to be, but it's the worst place for them to be. An older Australian is not going to get the kind of care and stimulation that they need stuck in a hospital bed.
We should be getting them out of those hospital beds and into an aged care home or back into their own home, and the Federal Government needs to be prioritising that and that's what we're calling for.
Reporter:
And should the Commonwealth be matching WA's $100 million loan for aged care capital works?
Senator Anne Ruston:
The Federal Government currently does have an aged care capital works program called the ACAP program.
It is great to see that some of the states and territories are supporting investment in aged care homes because we know as we sit here right now that we need over 10,000 new aged care beds every year for the next 10 years in order to meet the demand that we can see for our aged care homes. Last year, there were less than 800 new beds that came online. So they're missing their targets by so much it's not funny.
Once again, this is a Federal Government that is expecting and relying on State Governments to come in and fill the gap. Whilst I commend any State Governments that's making the investment, I condemn the Federal Government because their policy initiatives are what are stopping the private sector from building these homes in the first place.
Reporter:
Just on migration policy, you said that this package is budget neutral and will strengthen the economy. Will the Coalition release the analysis and assumptions behind it so Australians can independently test that claim?
Ben Small MP:
Look, the package has been modelled and the analysis done by the Parliamentary Budget Office. As to what will be released, that will be a matter for the Shadow Home Affairs Minister, Jono Duniham but I think that where this policy has taken months to develop and gone through the appropriate processes of the Parliament, like having the Parliamentary Budget Office engage in that analysis, Australians can have confidence because we've announced one policy with one set of parameters.
You're seeing in Australia today, from other political parties, four different policies with four different numbers in four weeks. That's not policy-making, that's thought bubbles on the run. This is a considered and analysed process that we have gone through that saw appropriate consultation with industry stakeholders.
That's why I know that South West businesses will be supportive of the package we've unveiled today because we've actually been out in the community listening to the needs of businesses, big and small, listening to the needs of Australians who are frustrated that they can't get their kids into school, there are queues at every hospital, our social infrastructure is crumbling and the dream of home ownership has become a nightmare.
What we've got today is a policy that addresses those things in a way that's gone through the Parliamentary Budget Office and appropriate consultation. It's not a thought bubble.