Today starts Part 1 of a series I’ll be running this week. A friend recently asked me to name one BAD thing John Howard’s Liberal Party had done. I told her I didn’t know where to start and didn’t have time to get into it then. I’ve racked my brains and come up with one thing. Maybe two. Please feel free to add to it. I haven’t kept a running list over the past decade and some things have undoubtedly slipped my mind. Today we begin with Health and the Environment.
Health
1. Reduced the rebate on medical services provided by doctors and thus has overseen an 11% decrease in bulk billing. From an all-time high of 80.6% under Labor, Howard and Abbott have brought bulk billing down to 67.7%.
2. Destroyed Medicare’s dental health plan
3. Decreased hospital funding
4. Forced older Australians to sell their homes through a user pays policy for nursing homes
5. Raised the safety net to an unreachable level
6. Done nothing to help the millions of Australians who suffer from mental illnesses, in a country with one of highest levels of suicide in the world.
7. Introduced a user pays scheme for the drugs watchdog TGA, thus giving the drugs industry more power over its own watchdog.
8. Introduced a Bill to get the contraceptive pill banned for young Australians. This would have caused many pregnancies in 14 year old girls. In turn this demand on our teenagers would have caused greater social problems as they dropped out of school or found it impossible to keep up, forcing them and their babies onto our welfare system, unfairly causing them heartache and causing a greater strain on our welfare system.
9. Changed the make up of the Pharmaceutical Benefits Advisory Committee, thus giving industry a stronger role in deciding what drugs are allowed on the market.
10. Brownwyn Bishop’s kero baths scandal
11. Refused to back prevention of the root causes of asthma and melanomas when he refused to sign the Kyoto protocol.
12. inadequate recompense for carers (about 85 cents a day)
13. Did not try to make sure medicines for ordinary Australians would stay cheap after an FTA with the USA. Our PBS is the envy of the rest of the world and Howard would rip it apart if Latham hadn’t stopped him.
14. Tried to force pensioners and everyone onto the private health system.
15. Private health premiums have gone up under Howard.
Environment
16. Instead of backing proven, clean and efficient energy resources such as solar and wind energy, Howard put millions of dollars into researching whether it might be possible to pump dangerous fossil fuels and carbon emissions back into the ground. The effects of such an idea are unlikely to be good or safe. Solar energy is safe and it’s making millions of dollars for countries like Japan who have backed their renewable energy industries.
17. General inaction and disinterest
18. Despite commitments by almost everyone else in the world, JH refused to sign the Kyoto protocol to lower greenhouse emissions, to the peril of Australia’s future generations who will suffer more asthma and melanomas than any previous generation.
That's Part 1, more to come soon.
But on another topic....
I am outraged by Family First’s scare campaign against the Greens. Since when was it the Christian thing to do to lie and distort? They want to talk about extreme? What about a Party that believes in reserving health and education for households where the parents are married with 2.3 kids who are still living at home, while the rest of us wait for the leftovers?! That’s not Family First, that’s make Australia worse! Neither major party should control the Senate, but why is the Liberal Party making deals with this vocal minority?