Nick Champion (Wakefield, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

The one thing about this government is that it is pretty reliable in the way it goes about things, so, in health, we see cuts to the health budget, cuts to hospitals, cuts to doctors' rebates—an attack on the healthcare system. We see it constantly attempting to push costs onto consumers. We see savings made from health—and the member for Boothby referred to efficiencies in this bill of $6.6 billion—but we never see those savings or those efficiencies reinvested into health, which is what should happen. If you are going to make savings from health, they should be reinvested into health. We see no consultation with stakeholder groups, no consultation with the opposition, no consultation with the community. In this case, we saw this agreement as it rolled into parliament—no Senate committee. We have a government playing chicken with the parliament, wrapping this all up into a big package, presenting it at five minutes to midnight and expecting the parliament to sign off on it with an up-and-down vote, a yes-or-no vote, on the whole package. It is simply an attempt to obscure some of the consequences of passing this bill. That is what this government is all about. That is its modus operandi. That is the way it goes about things.

We know that Labor had quite a different approach in government. We did not hack into health. We protected consumers. We had good consultation. We did good things for public health. And the savings we made—and in this area, the area of medicine, the savings were $20 billion to the PBS over 10 years—were reinvested into health. It was the same with means-testing the private health insurance rebate. That saving was reinvested into health. That is an important philosophical and practical difference between the way that the respective parties of the government and the opposition go about these arrangements.

It is a very sad day for the community when the government behaves this way. It undermines certainty in the sector. It undermines certainty in the community. It adds to great consternation in the community. You feel it if you go to a general practice or if you go out in the community. I was doing one of my shopping centre stalls at Elizabeth Park shopping centre not so long ago, and the pharmacist came out and had a talk with me about their concerns about the way this government was going about things. They were very great concerns indeed, based around their very real desire to service the community.

The National Health Amendment (Pharmaceutical Benefits) Bill 2015, as other speakers have said, introduces a new PBS pricing policy to reduce costs for innovative F1 and generic F2 medicines; allows pharmacies to discount patient co-payments by up to $1; removes some of the over-the-counter medicines from the PBS; changes the structure of pharmacy remuneration to remove the link to previous prices; and increases the membership of the PBAC from 18 to 21 and introduces a full-time chair.

Labor will support this bill is it moves through this House, but we do so with great concerns. As with this government's 'initiatives' in so many other areas of health, whether it be medical research or other areas, we worry about how the government goes about things in this opaque way, a way that does not present members of this parliament with enough time to properly scrutinise them, where it is done in a blind rush. Despite having had literally years to do something about some of these things—to give certainty to the pharmacists about location rules or other matters—the government wait till the clock is at five minutes to midnight before it rolls in here in a blind rush, in a chaotic mess, presenting the parliament with an up-or-down vote. That is a very concerning thing. It is a worrying thing.

If you look at the media, there have been a number of articles about these matters. Sue Dunlevy had one on 20 May. It was quite hostile to the interests of pharmacists. Some of the commentary from Brian Owler in this is interesting. The article records him as follows:

The deal has outraged the Australian Medical Association president Professor Brian Owler who says its "shows there is one approach for pharmacists and another for everyone else in the health system".

That is a pretty interesting thing to put on the public record, I would have thought. And of course we have Medicines Australia saying:

While the Pharmacy Guild was able to secure certainty with a significant increase in funding for their members, the sector that invents and manufactures medicines is being forced to provide more than $3bn in savings.

So you have out there in the public arena very serious concern about the way the government approaches health and the way it approaches different healthcare groups in different ways.

In other areas of the PBS listings, we see this government's health minister has knocked paracetamol off the PBS. That sounds on the face of it like a reasonable thing to do, but if you look at the ABC Fact Check of 13 May 2015, in its verdict it says:

Paracetamol prescriptions cost the government around $73 million a year on the PBS, but 85 per cent of that cost comes from prescriptions for people in chronic pain from osteoarthritis.

The high dose, slow release paracetamol formulation they are prescribed can't be bought from a supermarket for $2.

It goes on to say:

Ms Ley is incorrect.

There are some important things the community might be concerned about and might well be flushed out in a Senate committee. This is traditionally the role of Senate committees. We are used to bills in this House being guillotined, not so much under this government because they have got such a lethargic legislative agenda, and what agenda they do have is stalled in the Senate, along with so much of their legislation. What has not stalled is abandoned after pressure from the backbench.

Mr Taylor interjecting—

It is good to have an audience in the backbench here. We wonder if they are part of the 39 or the 61. I guess in the member for Hume's case it might not matter because he might not be with us too much longer, despite his grand ambitions. They might all be brought undone by the vagaries of electoral redistribution. We will just have to wait and see about all that, but he would be like a shooting star coming through this chamber—there he goes, then out again. I have seen it before, having lived through a change of government—but I wander off the topic, Deputy Speaker. I can see you are paying attention—

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