Demands are growing for the Coalition to explain increasingly mixed messages on budget policy, as the Australian Medical Association said the Abbott government had to go “back to the drawing board” on health policy and the Senate pushed for a total rethink of higher education changes.
The treasurer, Joe Hockey, is still insisting that without policies from last year’s budget – including the higher education changes and the GP co-payment – the budget will “never return to surplus”. But the prime minister, Tony Abbott, has said he will not push a Medicare policy unless it is backed by the doctors, nor other savings that have no chance of passing the Senate. Abbott seemed to suggest that in its next budget the government would concentrate on curbing expenditure growth, and offsetting any new spending, rather than further spending cuts. He said there would be no new budget cuts that ate into household budgets.
The president of the Australian Medical Association, Dr Brian Owler, is demanding a meeting with Abbott to try to understand the government’s direction.
“These mixed messages are not fair to GPs or to patients. The treasurer is still marching on with the current budget plans, others are saying the co-payment should be dumped and the prime minister says he wants our agreement … We would like to meet the prime minister to try to sort out what direction the government is taking.”
Owler said the AMA was opposed to all the government’s proposed savings, which involve cuts to some Medicare rebates and an across-the-board freeze in their levels. And it would only consider a co-payment, with exemptions for pensioners and children, if the money raised was invested back into general practice – which would deliver the government no savings to be directed to its proposed medical research fund.
“They need to go back to the drawing board. They need to look at the health portfolio as a whole, because there are savings to be made, but not in this way,” Owler said.
Labor, the Greens, the Palmer United party and two crossbench independents will also move on Wednesday for a wholesale re-evaluation of higher education changes, sending them to a Senate committee to re-examine “the principles” and “the need to develop viable alternatives to deregulation” which is the crux of the government’s changes.
The committee will report by 17 March, but is likely to propose dramatically different changes to those planned by the government.
The education minister, Christopher Pyne, argues that removing limits on the amounts universities can charge students, and extending funding to sub-bachelor programs and private colleges, are “nothing short of essential to the wellbeing of Australia’s future economy”.
But both Labor and the Greens say a new system would have to include additional investment in higher education, not cuts.
“There is no doubt that the alternative approach to the government’s involves increasing public investment … The claims that have been made that there is not the political will for there to be increased public investment in universities is false. It’s just wrong. The government is telling lies,” Labor’s education spokesman, Senator Kim Carr, told the Guardian in January.
Independent senator Nick Xenophon – who backed the higher education inquiry – said the policy had become “a total mess”.
