LEAKED: Government proposal abolishes Medicare

In line with the successful unveiling of the Turnbull government’s new skilled-migrant policy — under which 457 visas are to be completely abolished and replaced by a 100% new kind of visa system under which temporary migrants will be allowed to come to Australia only if employers can establish that they’re needed to fill a skills shortage — the government would like to announce a suite of additional exciting new policies.

1. Massive budget savings are to be achieved by the scrapping of all unemployment benefits. The unemployment benefits scheme will be replaced by a completely new system named Job-Deficiency Plus: under this, instead of providing unemployment benefits, the government will simply pay a certain amount of money on a regular basis to people who can establish that they do not currently have a job: this to be established by the filling out of certain forms.

2. The inefficient and costly Medicare program will be dismantled, adding billions to the bottom line. The savings achieved by the abolition of Medicare will assist in setting up Medisave, the government’s new healthcare body, under which Medicare’s unwieldy infrastructure will be replaced by a simple system wherein patients requiring medical care will be able to see a doctor, and then make a “Medisave Connection”, which will inform the Medisave servers that a doctor has been seen, upon which Medisave operatives will make a request to the Medisave Treasury for a payment to be made to defray the cost of the doctor visit. This is anticipated to result in massive improvements in both the expense and the quality of care.

3. Medisave will be supplemented by the termination of the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme, to be replaced by the Subsidised Medicines Plan. No Australian will be worse off under this change.

4. Skyrocketing house prices will be eased by the end, effective immediately, of negative gearing. Instead of negative gearing, which provides unreasonable benefits to the investor class and helps shut first-home buyers out of the market, the government has created the concept of Positive Gearing. With Positive Gearing, property investors will be prevented from amassing real estate empires through the use of negative gearing, but will be compensated by being allowed to reduce their taxable income by the amount lost on their investment in a property on an annual basis, which they are expected to consider extremely positive. Hence the name.

5. On consideration of the expensive duplication in responsibilities and duties of government in this country, the Turnbull government has decided to abolish states. This will result in massive savings to taxpayers, as they will no longer be forced to support three levels of government and their accompanying bureaucratic mechanisms. Although the government is excited about the streamlining of governance in this country as a result of ridding us of the burdensome irrelevancy of state governments, it also acknowledges there will be a certain loss of amenity. To compensate for this, we will be introducing a new system to replace the states, under which the country will be divided into a number of large geographical regions. Each geographical region will be assigned a regional authority to administer regional affairs and provide basic services to the inhabitants of the region. Decisions of the regional authority will be made by representatives of the local populations, who will be chosen by means of a public vote held at regular intervals. The regional-authority system is expected to be a vast improvement on the outdated “state” system.

*Satirist Ben Pobjie discovered this draft policy announcement lying around on the relevant minister’s desk