Rowan Ramsey (Grey, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

The electorate of Grey covers the vast majority of South Australia and has many rural towns. I estimate by the Rowan Ramsey calculator—the thing that says that if the town has a licensed premise it is a town and if it does not have a licensed premise it is not—that there are about 134. Not all of these have pharmacies but most of the towns—anything over about 500 people generally does. In many cases these are very small operations. Often they belong to a cluster of pharmacies, where you might have one pharmacy with outreach networks. They are so important to our small rural communities. I know some pharmacists have more than five or six stores and they offer ongoing services. Even in the town I come from we have an in-house videoconferencing dispensing system, which enables the pharmacist to be remote. The drug bottle is held up by the staff and identified properly and dealt with in that manner, which retains a service where otherwise it would fail. It is very important, because our local hospitals rely on having local pharmacies, and our ability to provide ongoing medical services relies on having local pharmacies. There is hardly any point having a doctor in the town if, when he or she prescribes drugs for a person, that person cannot purchase them anywhere. So these are essential services.

I have come to know many pharmacists and they have become my friends. There was quite a bit of concern in the negotiation of the Sixth Community Pharmacy Agreement, and they wore a pretty regular path to my door—or to my email and my telephone—to make sure that I understood what was at stake here. I must congratulate the Minister for Health, the Hon. Sussan Ley, who picked up this responsibility in December and had six months to come to an agreement over the sixth pharmacy agreement. All through that process, it was very comforting to my constituency that the minister comes from regional Australia and actually understands what impacts, in a small community, a reliable and, hopefully, profitable pharmacy can have—because, in the end, if they are not profitable, they will not be there. I was able to assure my constituents through that time that I had great faith in the minister. I must say that the agreement she has finally reached has absolutely justified that faith. It has been welcomed by pharmacists within my constituency. The fact that we have an agreement now for the next five years is good for pharmacies, it is good for all of Australia but it is particularly good for rural and regional Australia.

Pharmacists have been increasingly expected to supply a growing range of services, at great net benefit to the customer. These are things that we just take for granted now, things like—I have dealt with aged parents in the past—blister packs, medication reviews, screenings for various ailments that maybe we do not have to go to doctors for anymore, whole-of-healthcare plans and even delivery of flu shots, I noticed last season. Pharmacists will be asked to do increasingly more as the health dollar becomes scarcer and harder to come by in Australia. All of these services have been supplied without a fee for service. Pharmacists have been doing good things for their communities, for the health of the general public, and have not been rewarded for it.

In this period when pharmacists were contacting me, I became increasingly aware of how much they had been affected by the recent changes that shorten the period in which drugs remain at a cost when they came off patent. It had resulted in a fairly serious financial hit to many of these pharmacies, and they were telling me: 'We can't handle any more. Government might need savings in this area, but pharmacy cannot handle any more.' They were telling me it was close to the wire and they were already looking at lay-offs in their pharmacies. Of course, that would have led to a lessening of those services that we have now come to rely on pharmacies to provide—services that in fact they were not getting paid for. In that period, I had the privilege of having Minister Sussan Ley visit my electorate—about six weeks ago now—and I took her to a town called Kadina and another one called Peterborough. We had extensive meetings with pharmacists on those days, and I was very pleased that they were heard. One of the things the Sixth Community Pharmacy Agreement has done is provide a funding stream directly to the pharmacists to address this issue. It has delinked the income that pharmacists derive from the sale price of the medicines that they sell and actually now provides income via fee for service. That is a great move forward. It is something that they can build a business model on. They know that, as the price of drugs fluctuates in the market, their income will not be affected.

The Fifth Community Pharmacy Agreement was for $15.7 billion. The Sixth Community Pharmacy Agreement is for $18.9 billion. I did some calculations on that, and that comes to about 20 per cent. Twenty per cent over five years is pretty good, I reckon, in the current economic environment. It is certainly better than CPI. In fact, it is better than our recent growth rate as well. So it is a good deal for pharmacy, and it is not greatly surprising that pharmacists have welcomed it. In that extra money, there is an extra $600 million to help pharmacies provide primary health care—these other services I have been talking about. This enables them to reach out to the community and, rather than just being a medicine retail operation, provide better service in those areas that I have talked about, where we sometimes have limited medical services. Pharmacies can take an increasing role. I have already spoken about the fact that pharmacists' incomes will be delinked somewhat from the cost of the medicines themselves. At the Pharmacy Guild's request, the minister was able to move the indexation of the dispensing fees from the wage price index to CPI. I am very pleased that that was also able to be delivered.

When revolutionary new drugs come on the market, Australians want to have immediate access to them. There is very good reason for that. If you have someone close to you who is suffering greatly from a disease, an ailment—cancer, for example—and you know there is a new drug out there on the market, you want immediate access to that drug. This government has been very good at listing new drugs on the PBS. In May alone, $1.3 billion worth of new drugs were listed on the PBS. There is another $2.5 billion worth under consideration at the moment. It is entirely justifiable and understandable that the public would be demanding access to those drugs, no matter what they cost. But at the end of the day, while the government approves that process we have to find money to cover the costings of those new listings.

One of the areas that has been targeted under this agreement is the supply of over-the-counter drugs under the PBS. This came as a bit of a surprise to me because I am like everyone else and go to the doctor from time to time. The idea of getting Panadol or one of its generic counterparts on the PBS had never occurred to me. I can understand why people might like to get their medicines that way, but something that can be bought quite simply at the supermarket without prescription hardly qualifies as a vital medical drug to me. I think that is the kind of tightening up we need in government. Sure—it might cost people a couple of dollars more than they had before, but it seems to be almost irresponsible to be going to the doctor for Panadol in the first place. If you need it, it is pretty cheap. These types of things are discounted in supermarket chains, and it just seems to be a rather strange place for the government and the taxpayer to be in.

There are 20 million scripts a year written for things that do not require a prescription, and 6.7 million scripts a year for paracetamol. I should not name Panadol as such, but that is the name that so many of us recognise paracetamol by. It is right that we should move on this area, and I think the public will generally understand that if we want those magnificent new cancer treatment drugs and things that are going to help our kids with diabetes, or whatever it might be, then we have to accept that we might have to buy our paracetamol down at the shop.

The other area the government has moved into is a variable co-payment. There has been quite a bit of discussion about how this might affect regional and rural communities. I am of the opinion that most of them that serve in communities where there is little or no competition will not pass this $1 variable deduction on to the consumer. I think there are pretty good reasons for that. If you said to those consumers, 'You have got a choice here, you can pay the extra dollar or you can lose your pharmacy,' I do not have much doubt what the answer would be. It is not as if they are going to pay any more. What it means is that in places in the city where there is normally genuine and multiple competition, we may see that $1 come off, and it will be a saving to the consumer.

I do not think that is something we are going to see in regional Australia and I do not think it is something that is really demanded. Most of us that live in the country accept that there are some added expenses to living in the country. There are also some fantastic benefits to living in the country, and I wish I could drag half of those people from the city out to just give it a go. This is really where they should live to get their stress levels down and enjoy the wide open spaces. These are incredibly safe places to bring up their families. There are so many good things about living in the country. In fact, the only thing I can say against living in the country is that I have not got enough time to do everything. We all know that those people who live in rural communities have far busier lifestyles on average than those who live in the city. It is almost counterintuitive.

I think the country residents will bear that in very good stead, and we look forward to the fact that we will continue to have pharmacies within our communities. This government is committed to having the pharmacy sector stand alone and to making sure that it not only survives but prospers and delivers more and better services for all Australians.

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