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How will the bulk-billing increase be paid for?

There’s been criticism of the opposition that its support of the $8.5bn package hasn’t come with a plan to pay for it.

We’ve been very clear about the things that we don’t think that the federal government should be investing in. I mean, we’ve done things like, you know, we don’t believe [in] the federal government’s rewiring the nation, as an example, the national reconstruction fund, all of these things we’ve voted against, you know, we believe that public servants in Canberra are not what we need. We actually need frontline services, service workers, like doctors, like nurses, which this policy addresses.

We are going to have to expect, unfortunately, a scare campaign. I mean, yesterday, at the launch, the prime minister and [Mark] Butler spent more time talking about Peter Dutton and the Liberal party than they did about themselves. So I think we can expect a scare campaign. But the facts don’t lie. The truth of all of this is quite clear in the statistics – under their watch, the health system in Australia has been significantly diminished.