The potency of Albanese’s argument that Dutton was blocking free doctor’s visits would have been hard to ignoreFollow our Australia news live blog for latest updatesGet our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcastIt took Peter Dutton less than half a day to sign up to $8.5bn in his election plans to match the Labor government’s commitment to redefine Medicare bulk billing.Such is the potency of Anthony Albanese’s attack on Dutton’s record as health minister – the man who thought up a $7 co-payment for GP visits – and Labor’s campaign to raise fears about what a Coalition government would do to vital public services. Barely 14 hours after the Medicare announcement was published in the media on Saturday night, Dutton said his team would match it “dollar for dollar”.Sign up for Guardian Australia’s breaking news email Continue reading…The potency of Albanese’s argument that Dutton was blocking free doctor’s visits would have been hard to ignoreFollow our Australia news live blog for latest updatesGet our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcastIt took Peter Dutton less than half a day to sign up to $8.5bn in his election plans to match the Labor government’s commitment to redefine Medicare bulk billing.Such is the potency of Anthony Albanese’s attack on Dutton’s record as health minister – the man who thought up a $7 co-payment for GP visits – and Labor’s campaign to raise fears about what a Coalition government would do to vital public services. Barely 14 hours after the Medicare announcement was published in the media on Saturday night, Dutton said his team would match it “dollar for dollar”.Sign up for Guardian Australia’s breaking news email Continue reading…
It took Peter Dutton less than half a day to sign up to $8.5bn in his election plans to match the Labor government’s commitment to redefine Medicare bulk billing.
Such is the potency of Anthony Albanese’s attack on Dutton’s record as health minister – the man who thought up a $7 co-payment for GP visits – and Labor’s campaign to raise fears about what a Coalition government would do to vital public services. Barely 14 hours after the Medicare announcement was published in the media on Saturday night, Dutton said his team would match it “dollar for dollar”.
Four hours before the opposition leader and shadow health minister, Anne Ruston, pledged to meet the government’s announcement to boost free GP visits, the shadow treasurer, Angus Taylor, was on Sky News, being a little coy about what the Coalition would do and asking Labor “where’s the money going to come from?”
“We will work through that over the next little while,” Taylor continued. “Next little while” turned out to be approximately 240 minutes, before Dutton and Ruston’s price-match promise landed.
Despite Taylor’s concerns about cost, neither Dutton’s press release nor a subsequent press conference revealed where the Coalition would find $8.5bn – beyond a vague claim that “the Coalition always manages the economy more effectively and that’s why we can afford to invest into health and education services”.
Treasurer Jim Chalmers said the government had provisioned $5.4bn of the cost in the mid-year economic and fiscal outlook; health minister Mark Butler indicated they could seek to cover further costs through new measures to be announced.
But surely, if there was ever an area worthy of the government’s balance books dipping further into the red if necessary, it would be addressing concerning trends in bulk billing. The government’s own figures on Sunday conceded less than half of Australians were always bulk billed when seeing a GP in 2023-24, and warned of large discrepancies in rates across Australia; too many people are simply skipping doctor’s visits because they can’t afford rising fees.
In February, a Cleanbill report found an adult without a concession card would not be able to find a bulk-billing GP in 10% of federal electorates.
In a wealthy country like Australia, where we pride ourselves on fair access to health services and care, it is shameful and tragic that people are having to check their wallet before deciding whether they can see a doctor for basic services. That’s before we even get to dental services, with teeth and gums treated as though they’re a luxury rather than parts of the body that require healthcare just as much as chests and throats.
It’s good public policy to support the health of the population, and help people get the care they need, regardless of their bank balance. The government should be applauded for putting an eye-watering $8.5bn to the problem, as should the opposition (despite its otherwise thin policy offering thus far) for backing a good idea when they see one.
But there’s more than just good policy sense behind the Coalition’s rapid adoption of a plan it initially said it wanted to see more details about.
In a campaign where Dutton currently has built up some momentum, both politically and narratively among many commentators, a protracted argument about Medicare could be the coin on the tracks to derail his train.
Because Labor is succeeding at making this election all about Medicare, and Dutton’s team can see the danger looming up ahead. Labor is building a case that a Dutton government would be Abbott 2.0, slashing and burning vital services.
It’s why Labor and the Coalition spent the weekend sending around Canberra their duelling breakdowns of Medicare funding and bulk billing rates during their times in office; it’s why Labor set up a special Facebook page to throw mud at Dutton’s health record, and why the Coalition set up a website of its own called ‘health facts’ to counter those narratives; and it’s why Dutton, whose campaign so far has been mostly about nickel-and-dime policy offerings and plans to cut spending, suddenly stumped up $8.5bn to match a promise before the prime minister even officially launched it at a campaign rally in Tasmania.
The potency of a potential argument from Labor, that Dutton was blocking free doctor’s visits if he hadn’t signed up to the pledge, would have been hard to ignore. Dutton called it a “scare campaign”.
You’ll see a lot of health statistics going around in this campaign.
The Coalition on Saturday pointed to health data they say showed an 84% bulk-billing rate when Dutton was health minister in 2014, and an 88.5% rate when the Coalition left office in May 2022, compared to a 77.7% rate in December 2024 under Labor.
But, as Guardian Australia has previously reported, Butler in 2022 claimed those Coalition-era figures were “not honest”; they were also questioned by consumer groups and health policy experts who said the figures had been artificially inflated.
On Sunday, Butler further accused the Coalition of “cooking the books” on that data by including millions of Covid-era vaccinations, pathology and telehealth appointments in their sums, which he said Labor wasn’t doing in its projections.
The government says it has taken time to turn around years of health system neglect, and it needs a bit more time to reverse deteriorating circumstances.
After a week where the Reserve Bank cut interest rates for the first time in years, Labor has succeeded in dragging the argument back to its cost of living and public services wheelhouse, away from the law and order and public safety areas Dutton had managed to make the key issues of recent months.
Whether the government can keep the focus there, is a core question of the next few months of campaign until election day.
Both sides say they have a good story to tell on health, and have their own cherrypicked statistics to prove they’d do the better job in future. Jim Chalmers presented the election as a choice between Labor “strengthening” and the Coalition “strangling” Medicare; Ruston accused Labor of “weakening” the system. Both sides are making the claim that they’d fix the healthcare crisis presided over by the other side.
But families who simply want to go to the doctor without having to worry about another bill can’t afford for this problem to go on.