Ms KING (Ballarat) (16:37): It is always a delight to follow the member for Lyons, who I think represents some of the poorest communities across Australia. He seems to be such a champion of those poor people in his community that he somehow thinks that this budget, which puts most of the investment into the top end of town over people in his electorate, is somehow a fair budget. Let me go to one of the areas in particular where this budget has again cut funding to services. The budget on Tuesday night proved that, no matter who the leader is, Medicare will never ever be safe under a Liberal government. This is a government that has sought at every stage to attack bulk-billing, undermine universal access to health care, make patients pay more and more, and wreck the Medicare that Australians know and love. That pattern was confirmed again in Tuesday night's budget, when the Treasurer again lined up the patients of this nation for billions of dollars worth of cuts. Having already imposed a four-year freeze on Medicare payments—a $1.3 billion freeze—in a shock move to doctors and what will be a shock move to patients, the government decided to hit them again, with another $925 million freeze, by extending it for another two years. Six years is not a freeze; it is an ice age when it comes to Medicare. It is designed to drive down bulk-billing, force patients to pay more and end universal access to health care. As the Rural Doctors Association have said, it is putting the health care of rural and regional patients into Siberia. In short, it is not just a GP tax by another name but a GP tax on steroids. Tony Abbott's now discredited GP tax only wanted to make patients pay $7. If this Prime Minister gets his way, Sydney University's Family Medicine Research Centre shows that by 2020 patients will be paying twice as much—a $14 GP tax. For many practices, this is the final straw, and we are already reading about clinics abandoning bulk-billing altogether and being forced to charge $10 or $20, even for children and concession card patients. Mr Hawke interjecting— Ms KING: I hear the minister at the table say, 'I pay $60 for a co-payment.' What you don't actually understand— Mr Hawke: Mr Deputy Speaker, I raise a point of order. The shadow minister has misrepresented what I said, and I ask her to withdraw it. It is offensive and I ask her to withdraw it. The DEPUTY SPEAKER ( Mr Craig Kelly ): There is no point of order. Ms KING: So he claims it is $60 in his seat. What you do not understand is that you will not be paying just $60—and that is people who are not being bulk-billed; bulk-billing rates are already high in this country and they will start to drop—it is concession card patients who are currently being bulk-billed who will be paying more and more, and patients who are currently paying co-payments will also be paying more than they currently pay because they will be cross-subsidising those patients. You do not understand how this works. What we are trying to do, and what we have done in health care for well over a decade now, is to make sure we have high rates of bulk-billing because that keeps fees low for everybody. We heard the AMA president, who is often ridiculed by the other side of the House, say on budget night that the measure the government has put in this budget will mean 'the poorest, the sickest and the most vulnerable will be the hardest hit'. It confirms, as the Minister for Health has made clear, that this government is committed to forcing down bulk-billing by making more patients pay to see a doctor. Of course, that was just the start in this budget. We saw another $182 million hit from the health flexible funds, taking the total cuts to these crucial programs that fund drug and alcohol services, chronic disease services, communicable disease services to $1 billion under this government. They are cuts that will hurt. Of course, we have seen $1 billion cut out of the Child Dental Benefits Schedule. This government is kidding itself if it thinks that millions and millions more patients on the public dental waiting list will somehow get seen when in Tasmania there is a waiting list of three years for public dental—if you can actually access it. The government is kidding itself. The budget has been described as smoke and mirrors. It has been described as a hoax and a fraud on the Australian people, and that is exactly what it is. A billion dollars cut out of kids dental in this budget. (Time expired)