How Australia Won Universal Health Care — And How Workers Saved It With a General Strike
In 1974, the Whitlam Labor government introduced Australia’s first universal health care system. Despite its flaws, Medibank was a huge step forward — and Australia’s unions organized a general strike to defend it against conservative attacks.
Medibank was typical of PM Gough Whitlam’s technocratic and research-based approach to welfare policy. (David Austen / Hulton Archive via Getty Images)
In 1967, Moss Cass, a medical doctor and left-wing member of the Victorian branch of the Australian Labor Party (ALP), invited the Labor opposition leader Gough Whitlam to a meeting at his house in in Canterbury, in Melbourne’s eastern suburbs. Whitlam met a coterie of health-policy experts, including two health economists, Dick Scotton and John Deeble.
Scotton and Deeble proposed that Australia could replace private health insurance with a universal public health insurance scheme that would be funded by a 1 percent levy on taxable income. Whitlam was interested and asked them for a copy of their paper.
The ALP leader subsequently announced that Labor would introduce a national health insurance scheme known as Medibank. The proposal became a centerpiece of Labor policy in the lead up to the 1969 election.
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