Mr LEE —My question is addressed to the Minister for Health and Family Services. In your letter to the residents of Box Hill, did you promise your constituents that Medicare rebates would not be changed? Is it a fact that you have betrayed this commitment to your constituents by reducing rebates for expensive surgical procedures? Won't this decision mean that a pensioner who lives in your electorate, or any other electorate in Australia, will now not only wait longer for emergency dental treatment and be forced to pay more for their essential medicines but also have to pay more for these operations?

Dr WOOLDRIDGE —That specific part of that letter was in response to quite inaccurate claims by the Labor Party, the Doctors Reform Society and others who were trying to scare people before the election that we were going to reduce the rebate from 85 per cent to 75 per cent. We did not do it. The only people that have ever reduced the rebate from 85 per cent to 75 per cent is you mob, who did it for in-patient services. You whacked another $200 million of costs onto the private health funds. It is one of the reasons that we have so many problems with the spiralling of private health insurance prices.

If you want to know what my electorate is going to think, I will tell you. Of the people over 60 years of age in my electorate, 70 per cent have private health insurance, and they will be ecstatic because we have done what you never did and introduced rebates for private health insurance care. I am happy to go to any election on that issue.