tigerpie wrote:Keating was the last PM to give us what we needed, not what we wanted.
Easily the best parliamentary performer I've seen.
But made decisions without fear of losing votes or what was popular.
The Hawke/Keating government changed the Australian economy, I think, in a bad way in the long run. It looked good at the time but no allowance was made for how the states that ran public care would respond and economise.
Their "accord" with the unions as I remember it, was that the unions would not demand wage rises above CPI. Then the ALP government lowered the rate of growth of the CPI by lowering our tariff barriers and, as a side-effect, strangling our manufacturing base, making us dependent on imports from those current that still had a manufacturing industry. The effect of that has built up gradually, but we are now paying the price for that policy. Sure, manufactured goods are cheap compared to what they were, but we have no real economic independence from those we now import manufactured goods from, and this has been highlighted in recent times by the CV-19 pandemic.
The other issue of that ALP government was their effect on health care. They formulated the view that Medicare cost so much because we had too many doctors who were seeing people unnecessarily to make money. The AMA figures on waiting times for appointments and the average doctor being 55 years old at the time were dismissed. Ultimately, that lead to a shortage of doctors. In addition, Medicare was run in such a way the the "Schedule Fee" has risen by only about 64% of inflation ever since leading to increasing gaps above the Medicare Rebate.
This actually happened first under the Whitlam government, and the Fraser government that followed saved the situation by allowing private health fund to cover some of the gap. That also helped to keep private health cover affordable by maintaining higher membership rates.
Keating dumped this and, as a result, gap fees have increased steadily. Then because they were less useful to the young private fund memberships declined, making private health insurance more costly. State governments, no longer as well subsidised by the diversion of non-urgent health care to the private sector, then found the public centres expensive and started limiting public beds and staffing, and selling off the land, leading to our current problems in public hospitals an in the Ambulances ramping outside them.
Until 1988 I bulk-billed all pensioners and unemployed people who presented to my private practice. By the mid-90s that was no longer viable because overheads were going up a lot faster than income. By 2007 I packed in private practice in favour of paid locum work in rural public health services.