I read with some interest the editorial in The Age on Wednesday. I certainly can’t disagree that the Coalition has made a poor start to government. Like all Australians, I’ve witnessed a failure of leadership on too many fronts. I’ve seen the policy hypocrisy and the internal divisions – and I’ve been as shocked as anyone by the cruelty that underpins the Prime Minister’s first budget.

But, perhaps unsurprisingly, I can’t agree that Labor is "staying under the radar". The Age is absolutely correct that the opposition has a big challenge ahead of it. Labor will continue to be passionate but responsible opposition – ferocious in our attack on the Prime Minister’s policy failures, but always ready to work together in the national interest.

What we will never do is be mere spectators as Tony Abbott tries to take our country backwards and wreck our fair society. The Age’s readers would expect anything less from me. Labor will keep fighting Tony Abbott’s $7 GP tax because it is nothing other than the destruction of universal healthcare as we know it.

Four decades ago, the sick and the vulnerable were being let down or left out of a hopelessly inadequate health system – so Labor built Medibank. We became the first developed country in the world to introduce a universal health insurance scheme. A few years later, the Liberals made sure we were the first in the world to dismantle it.

After the Liberals destroyed Medibank, Labor built Medicare. Thirty years later, history is on the cusp of repeating. Medicare was brave and visionary policy in the finest Labor tradition. It stands alongside the minimum wage and the old age pension as a social reform that embodies the best ideals of Australian fairness. We’ve seen the Liberals destroy it once before, and we won’t let them do it again.