Tuesday, 31 October 2023

Payroll tax

Georgie CROZIER (Southern Metropolitan) (17:39): (551) My adjournment matter is for the attention of the Treasurer, and it goes to the chaotic, unfair and retrospective health tax that he has decided to deploy across Victoria into medical clinics. Not only is it going to hit GPs, it is going to hit other allied health professionals like dentists, physiotherapists and psychologists and those people that are tenanted in medical clinics that provide services to Victorians. Healthcare delivery in this state is critical, and we need to ensure that GP clinics will not close. If this retrospective tax does happen, then it is going to close up to 30 per cent of clinics. How daft a decision is that? The reason the government are doing this is because we are broke and they are trying to grab money from wherever they can, but to tax these medical clinics and cause clinics to close and cause clinics to increase prices – it will be the end of bulk-billing, let us face it – and to increase costs to patients and then push patients into emergency departments is just ridiculous. I received an email today from somebody who said:

… imagine the stress of getting to the point of closure, then having to jump through hoops to prove to the government you are on the verge of closure and then waiting to hear if your bill will be waived. And the unfairness that come with some practices not having to pay the tax while their neighbouring practice does.

That is in response to the letter that the Treasurer wrote on Friday to say that he would have the power to just waive away some of these bills if clinics were to close. This is the chaotic, unfair nature of what is going on. I mean, it is ridiculous that the Treasurer has put himself in this position and not listened to those that have been speaking to him for months and months and months. Yet on Friday he wrote this letter to the GP peak bodies and said, ‘Look, I know it’s going to close clinics.’ This letter is an admission that clinics will close.

If clinics close, then patients will have to go into our already struggling emergency departments. They will not have the same accessibility or equity of care that others do. They will have to travel further in regional Victoria. They will have to wait in long queues again. I heard the Premier this morning talking about the centres they have opened up, but you know if you turn up there after hours with a broken arm you are shunted off to an emergency department because there is no imaging. This is what this government does not understand – the implications of its decisions. So the action I seek is for the Treasurer to explain exactly what criteria he will apply to which clinics will close and which will remain open. As I said, that correspondence that I received earlier today spells it out very clearly:

… the unfairness that come with some practices not having to pay the tax while their neighbouring practice does.