The Labor scare campaign on “privatising Medicare” is running out of steam.
Bill Shorten’s big claim is turning into the “big lie” of the election campaign.
His original assertion was so bold on Sunday that it had to shape media coverage for a day or two but that will not last for much longer.
Labor has based its campaign on two government reviews: a May 2014 program to seek commercial ideas from payment service providers and a Productivity Commission examination of the delivery of government services. These are shallow foundations for such a big campaign. Shorten’s personal credibility is at stake if his claims fall over.
Nobody outside the partisan circles of the Labor Party is lending any weight to the key assumption in Shorten’s argument — that outsourcing the way payments are made would amount to privatising Medicare itself. This is fundamental. Nobody notices a change to a retailer if it swaps out the terminals it uses to take credit card purchases. Few customers ever know, or care, if a company outsources its payments.
Experts believe the Medicare payment system needs upgrading. Some believe outsourcing should be considered. The ferocity of the Labor campaign has forced Malcolm Turnbull to reject this option after months of consideration but his decision isn’t being welcomed by those who understand the problem.
Labor considered exactly the same problems when it was in government but nobody called its Payment and Information Delivery Reform Taskforce a “privatisation taskforce” in 2009.
The Coalition’s work on the same issue has gone further. Outsourcing was clearly up for discussion. While Turnbull insists that outsourcing the payments never went to cabinet, a series of Health Department decisions on Freedom of Information applications suggest the “contestability of payments” did go to cabinet in some way.
The Health Department decision on the documents sought by The Australian under Freedom of Information laws ruled that a letter from the Prime Minister to Health Minister Sussan Ley last October could not be released because it was a cabinet document.
After looking at the decisions on an FOI application by The Australian, independent expert Peter Timmins thinks some of the material was included in a draft of information that ultimately went to cabinet — not merely prepared with the option of going to cabinet. “Whether that was a cabinet committee or not we don’t know,” he says.
This shows that Shorten’s tactics have already produced dividends. His big claim may be false but it has put Turnbull on the defensive on the cabinet process. And when the Prime Minister insists he will not privatise Medicare, he is met by a Labor advertising campaign that highlights Tony Abbott’s broken promise at the 2013 election that there would be “no cuts to health” and John Howard’s promise in 1995 that there would “never ever” be a GST.
More than 48 hours after the first claim, however, there is no sign the scare is building. If anything, the fear is dissipating. The head of the government’s competition review, Ian Harper, rejected the fear campaign in The Australian Financial Review while the head of the government’s commission of audit, Tony Shepherd, called it a “gross misrepresentation” at the ABC. Experts like Stephen Duckett from the Grattan Institute say the system has to be modernised.
The effect of Shorten’s strategy has been to kill off a policy reform option — outsourcing the payment system — in a quest for political advantage.
This is a win for the status quo and those who defend it, such as the Community and Public Sector Union, regardless of the election outcome.
Yet Shorten has overcooked his claims. Turnbull’s response on Tuesday was to dismiss the privatisation scare and turn it into a test of Shorten’s truthfulness. “Mr Shorten has now abandoned any participation in the economic debate and instead engaged in one desperate lie after another,” he said.
Some will believe the Labor claim. It will erode some of the Coalition vote on July 2. Yet Turnbull has started to hit back effectively. The air of desperation in the Labor campaign may do Shorten greater damage over the next ten days.
