ABC 891

E&OE TRANSCRIPT
Interview – ABC 891 Adelaide with Matthew Abraham, David Bevan and Mark Butler
Wednesday 4 March 2015

SUBJECTS: GP co-payment; pensioner concessions; children in detention.

COMPERE: Good morning Mark Butler.

MARK BUTLER: Good morning gentleman.

COMPERE: And Christopher Pyne, Liberal MP for Sturt, Education Minister and Leader of the House, good morning Christopher Pyne.

CHRISTOPHER PYNE: Good morning gentlemen.

COMPERE: Christopher Pyne, the Prime Minister says the GP co-payment is dead, is buried, is gone. Well how confident can people be that it won’t cost them more to go to the doctor because eventually you have got to find a way of making this runaway train that is the health system pay for itself?

CHRISTOPHER PYNE: Well he said it was dead, buried and cremated and I think that is correct. We have obviously heard the feedback from the medical profession and from the public in general about Medicare and about the GP co-payment and so we will not be proceeding with that measure. We will of course be in the meantime be proceeding with the freeze of the indexation of the Medicare rebates so in fact the price that goes to the doctor will not be going up over the next three years. Until such time as we have a negotiation with the medical profession for other savings.

COMPERE: So instead of taking it out of the front pocket you will take it out of the back pocket, is that a fair summary?

CHRISTOPHER PYNE: No..

COMPERE: You’re still going to get the dough?

CHRISTOPHER PYNE: I think doctors, Andrew Southcott is very much involved in this discussion with Sussan Ley, is a doctor himself. They have identified that there is a lot of savings that could be made in health that are not being made now. And that we want to pursue those before we pursue any other measures.

COMPERE: But if you freeze the rebate, the gap is going to go up, isn’t it? Because the cost of running your local GP clinic isn’t going to stay the same so effectively our listeners will be faced with the same conundrum – that is they will have to pay a bigger and bigger gap?

CHRISTOPHER PYNE: No because 82 per cent of doctor visits are bulked billed and they don’t get charged anything at all.

COMPERE: But that will have to go down that percentage if you are freezing the rebate and the cost goes up?

CHRISTOPHER PYNE: No. I don’t know why you always see everything as a glass half empty, David. The truth is that under the Coalition, under Tony Abbott to begin with as Health Minister the rate of bulk billing increased. It is now 82 per cent. 70 per cent of non-concession holders are bulked billed – 70 per cent of people who aren’t a pensioner or don’t have a concession are already bulk billed so their price cannot go up. So this is good news and rather than seeing it as another negative that you are seeing it this morning, you should actually recognise that consumers are not going to be paying the GP co-payment and we are going to find other savings in a health budget which was $8 billion ten years, it is $20 billion today and in ten years it will be $30 billion and I think every Australian recognises the need to find savings in health because the current growth is unsustainable.

COMPERE: Mark Butler, Labor MP for Port Adelaide, do you believe that the co-payment is dead, buried and cremated? And really, even if you do now freeze the rebate, it is not going to have a big impact as many people are being bulk billed as Chris Pyne … no doubt, well anyway, as Chris Pyne says?

MARK BUTLER: Well he has got his figures right. The bulk billing rate is over 80 per cent but it only got there throughout our period of government. The bulk billing rate under Tony Abbott as Health Minister was significantly lower than that and there is no question that if you freeze the indexation of rebates to doctor for several years which is what the government is going to do is that the bulk billing rate is going to come down and the government has said it has a policy position that it thinks that the bulk billing rates should come down so there is no question that just because of that decision people will be paying more at the doctor but although this version, this latest version of the GP tax has apparently been taken off the table, the Health Minister Sussan Ley said yesterday, only yesterday that there are a lot of people who attend the doctor, these are her words, who can afford to pay a bit more and that is where we have to land in this discussion. So there will be some version of a co-payment in Medicare that returns to the table because Sussan Ley has been sent away by the Cabinet to find an alternative way to cut funds in Medicare by the Cabinet. So there is no question something is coming back.

COMPERE: And do you concede you would have to do the same? That the maths is inescapable?

MARK BUTLER: No we have a very different approach to this….

CHRISTOPHER PYNE: They have a money tree.

MARK BUTLER: We think of Medicare… no well, let’s take one example, we made a cut … this will be very interesting to see if this in in the integrational report yesterday, we made a save that Treasury…

CHRISTOPHER PYNE: Tomorrow.

MARK BUTLER: Sorry, tomorrow… that would save $100 billion over the next few decades. That was to stop the subsidy from taxpayers for the private health insurance rates for high income earners, so we would means test the private health insurance rebate whereby people receive a 30 per cent contribution by taxpayers, even if they were on several hundred thousand dollars a year. Now this Government opposed this every time we put it up before the Parliament, when we were in Government and has said that they will reintroduce the 30 per cent subsidy for private health insurance fees for very high income earners. Now when we did that that was the fastest growing item of health expenditure. It was going to overtake Medicare. So there are ways in which you can save money. It is a question of where you target those savings. And what this government seems intent on doing is driving this sort of universality, this bulk billing nature of Medicare.

COMPERE: In the meantime, Mark Butler, has your Labor colleague the Speaker of the House in State Parliament, Michael Atkinson, has he really revealed the lie of the Weatherill Government over pensioner concessions. Daniel Wills reports in The Advertiser today that he has seen correspondence to a constituent from Michael Atkinson where Atkinson assures the resident that the payment will continue, that is, the pensioner concessions. The payment will continue and the State Government will almost certainly pick up the tab.

MARK BUTLER: Well those two very different propositions, David, I haven’t seen that letter but my reading of the clip this morning that Michael Atkinson might have been saying to the constituent that the State Government was going to have to pick up the tab. There is no question there is a tab to pick up and that tab is a product of Tony Abbott’s budget last year, cutting the concessions contributions that have been made for almost twenty five years by the Commonwealth.

COMPERE: It was ten per cent, it wasn’t anything like a 100 per cent.

MARK BUTLER: Dollar for dollar! It was ten per cent of the total concessions budget, but it is exactly the dollar for dollar that the local councils and the state governments have talked about.

COMPERE: But a hundred per cent of the concessions is going, is it not?

MARK BUTLER: Hundred per cent of the local council rate concession?

COMPERE: Yeah.

MARK BUTLER: There is a whole range of other concessions, transport, utilities, it is dollar for dollar…

COMPERE: Tom Koutsantonis has taken this opportunity to bail out his commitment.

MARK BUTLER: No, no he has not. It is dollar for dollar. The reduction in the local council concession is dollar for dollar, it is the precise figure that Tony Abbott cut from the budget. The State Government contribution to the concessions budget, which include council rates, transport, utilities, and a whole range of other things, as far as I know has not reduced one jot.

COMPERE: Chris Pyne?

CHRISTOPHER PYNE: Well Michael Atkinson has always been refreshingly open and honest and yet again he has decided to expose the Koutsantonis-Weatherill campaign of misinformation for what it is which is a bald faced misinformation campaign for the South Australian public where they are spending $1.1 million of taxpayers’ money attacking the Federal Government at while they pocket the 90 per cent they were funding of the pension concessions so they are making a saving in their budget and trying to blame the Federal Government. Now what Michael Atkinson is saying is absolutely right, the State Government will continue to fund the pensioner concessions because every other state and territory has done it except South Australia so Steven Marshall and the State Liberals will not let them abolish them in this year’s budget – they will not pass the regulations require in the Upper House.

COMPERE: So another hit for the state budget?

CHRISTOPHER PYNE: Tom Koutsantonis and Jay Weatherill as exactly David said are trying to use the Federal Government taking ten per cent, or $19 out of $190, so that they can try and pocket the $171 and trying to blame us for it. And even more so, they are spending 1.1 million of taxpayers’ money trying to convince the South Australian public that somehow black is white!

MARK BUTLER: Well that is just not right. That is just not right; the reduction in the contribution by the Commonwealth is equivalent to the full $190. It is ten per cent of the total concessions budget, which covers public transport concessions, utilities concessions but the reduction from Canberra is the full $190.

CHRISTOPHER PYNE: Every other State and Territory is funding it…

MARK BUTLER: Well… every other State and Territory has had to...

CHRISTOPHER PYNE: Every other State and Territory is funding it…

MARK BUTLER: Has had to find money from other state programmes because of the cuts from Canberra…

[inaudible]

COMPERE: They have all had to find it out of their own budgets, haven’t they?

MARK BUTLER: And Jay and Tom may well have to find it this year, that is what Michael is saying. We will see in the June budget if…

CHRISTOPHER PYNE: Michael Atkinson is quite clearly saying, I predict that if you enjoyed the concession before you will be enjoying it in the next financial year in the same form or better. In other words, the State scare campaign of the Labor Party against the Federal Government is just a scare campaign, it is a farrago of lies.

MARK BUTLER: And if they do enjoy it because Tom and Jay have to cut state spending from somewhere else to cover Tony Abbott’s cuts.

CHRISTOPHER PYNE: Well that would be a first.

COMPERE: Mark Butler, putting aside some of the attacks on Gillian Triggs, or criticism of her, do you concede that she has not explained very well at all, if at all, why she delayed an inquiry into children in detention at a time where you were in office when it peaked at nearly 2,000 to really when she brought her most recent report about a month ago when the number of children in detention is vastly smaller than that. In other words, why didn’t she ask on the number of children in detention when you were in office, facing re-election and there was over 2,000 children in detention, when it was a real crisis?

MARK BUTLER: Well you would have to ask her that…

COMPERE: She has been asked that.

MARK BUTLER: All I can go from is her responses to the questions in the Senate inquiry and the other occasions on which she has addressed this issue and as I recall it she did not think it was proper to have an inquiry that would run through an election campaign now people can make their own decisions about whether that would be…

COMPERE: Do you regard that as a political decision? Why should she be worried about an election cycle? She is an independent commissioner and surely the rights of…

MARK BUTLER: Yeah, and she needs to independently make that judgment about whether it is proper to run an inquiry during an election campaign. People make up their own mind about that.

COMPERE: If you are human rights commissioner, and you are looking at a system where two thousand children under a Labor Government are in detention, you come to the conclusion that it would be in the interests of those children to wait until the election is out of the way, and well after the election is out of the way… and one of the excuses she gave is well we thought we would wait until the ten year anniversary of the last inquiry, rather than appears, and you would no doubt agree, was a disgraceful situation.

MARK BUTLER: Well she will make her own judgement about that, as an independent statutory officer holder…

COMPERE: Well I’m asking you.

MARK BUTLER: I have said that she took a decision, she didn’t want an inquiry to run through an election campaign. And people will make their own judgements about this but the thing about this whole debate, leave aside the way in which she was attacked here in the Senate last week, this thing about this debate I found astounding is that the government is acting as if this report is just a report about Liberal Party policy and for that reason it is partisan, that is what the Prime Minister says every day in Parliament. And we have taken our [inaudible] and read the report unlike many in the Liberal Party who proudly say they haven’t read the report, we have read the report and we recognise that is says many hard things to say about our time in Government. This is not a…

COMPERE: It would’ve been a lot harder to read if that was in an election campaign, wouldn’t it?

MARK BUTLER: Well, it wouldn’t have been finished by the election. What she was saying as I understand it is that the inquiry would be running through the election campaign. Now we recognise that there is some very hard things in the report said about Labor Party policy and we are bigger enough to cop that and to read that and hopefully learn from it. What Tony Abbott and the rest of the Government tries to pretend is that this is some partisan attack on the Liberal Party, if you read the report it is not that at all. And that is what I don’t understand about this highly personal attack on this independent officeholder.

CHRISTOPHER PYNE: I think Matthew raises a very good point about why this report began under the current Government who got the kids out of detention, rather than the previous government who put them into detention. And the answer apparently for Mark Butler is that as a statutory officer she didn’t want to influence the election. But if people could cast their minds to 2007 and that unhappy election, Glenn Stevens, the Governor of the Reserve Bank raised interest rates during the Federal Election, it didn’t stop Glenn Stevens who is also a statutory authority – statutory officer – from raising interest rates which was very politically damage. Now I am not accusing him of doing that for political purposes he made the objective decision that interest rates needed to go up, regardless of whether there was an election or not and he did it, he certainly did not help the Federal Government so the fact that Gillian Triggs’ defence is that she didn’t want to influence the election sounds rather hollow. And we do know that she spoke to Chris Bowen and Tony Burke about that decision and asked them about their advice. She spoke to the Labor Party about whether she should have an inquiry into their policy of putting children into detention, 2000 of them; there were none in detention when the Howard Government lost office.

COMPERE: And how many are in detention now?

CHRISTOPHER PYNE: I think it is about 140.

COMPERE: And is that 140 too many?

CHRISTOPHER PYNE: Yes it is and we are trying to get all of them out.

COMPERE: Well how hard could that be?

CHRISTOPHER PYNE: Well we go from 1,900 something under Labor, now down to about 140, we have done a great job, and we have stopped the boats so that there are no children going into detention. Labor had 50,000 unauthorised arrivals on 800 boats coming from a base of zero. The Left said we could not stop the boats, they have been stopped, the children have been getting out of detention and yes I want to get the next 140 out and I am sure that is what Peter Dutton is doing every day, trying to get them out.

COMPERE: Christopher Pyne, Liberal MP for Sturt, Education Minister and Leader in the House, thank you for your time. And Mark Butler, Labor MP for Port Adelaide, Opposition Environment and Climate Change spokesperson, thank you for your time gentlemen.

CHRISTOPHER PYNE: It’s a pleasure.

MARK BUTLER: Thank you.

[ends]