Mr TOLLNER (2:37 PM) —My question is addressed to the Minister for Health and Ageing. Would the minister inform the House of the steps the government has taken to make private health insurance better for consumers? Is the minister aware of any alternative policies?

Mr ABBOTT (Minister for Health and Ageing) —I thank the member for Solomon for his question. Like the rest of the government, he understands that you cannot have a strong Medicare system in this country without a strong complementary private health sector too. Support for the private health system has been one of the signature policies of the Howard government, particularly the private health insurance rebate. It is a rebate worth $1,000 a year to the average Australian family with private cover—a rebate which means that nearly nine million Australians now have access to the choice and security that private cover brings, including nearly one million people with incomes of less than $20,000 a year. In the September quarter, nearly 60,000 people took out private insurance, and from tomorrow the government is taking further steps to guarantee that portability of private cover is a reality.

I have been asked about alternative policies. So I turn to Labor’s forbidden book: the diaries written by the person whom they wanted to be Prime Minister just 12 months ago.

Opposition member interjecting—

Mr ABBOTT —That is right, the forbidden book. I read on page 129 that the Leader of the Opposition’s former chief of staff says: ‘The private health insurance rebate would be one of the first things abolished in any Beazley government.’ I read on page 129 that ‘the member for Jagajaga despises the rebate and wants to poleaxe it.’ Then on page 347, I read that Medicare Gold was ‘my plan’—that is to say, Mark Latham’s plan—‘for killing the private health insurance rebate’.

Ms Gillard interjecting—

Mr ABBOTT —‘It required a lot of work, all handled by Gillard’—the would-be assassin of the private health insurance rebate, now interjecting furiously, who said on the Friday when this book first hit the public pages, ‘People should not ignore the truths in this book.’ The truth that I most liked in this book was on page 112. There Mr Latham says of the Leader of the Opposition: ‘A big bellowing cow in parliament will never fool the public’—and haven’t we seen plenty of that today!