Peter Dutton (Dickson, Liberal Party, Minister for Health) Share this | Hansard source

As our population ages, we already know that by 2050 in this country 7½ thousand Australians each and every week will be diagnosed with dementia and Alzheimer's. There is the cost of medical technology—and a country like ours wants to embrace robotic surgery and all of that, which needs to be embraced quickly in an advanced economy but which is very expensive. I want to make sure that we can pay for all of that. At the moment, we provide, for a population of 23 million, 263 million free services each year on Medicare.

I am saying that we want to have a sustainable system. As Labor supported in the nineties and, indeed, have supported since the 1960s a co-payment in relation to the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme, I want to make sure that those who have a capacity to pay can pay, but under this scheme we retain bulk-billing so that those who cannot afford $7 can be bulk-billed.

Labor can pretend to the Australian public and, indeed, pretend to themselves that everything can be given away for free—

Mr Perrett interjecting—

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