Don Randall (Canning, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I am pleased to speak on the National Health Amendment (Pharmaceutical Benefits) Bill 2015. This is a very important issue for my constituents and the pharmacies within my electorate. Like the member for Lyne, I have something like 36 pharmacies in the electorate of Canning. The key component of this bill is the federal government's ongoing effort to provide Australians with reliable and efficient access to necessary and affordable medicines. This bill will allow for the implementation of the Sixth Community Pharmacy Agreement and the PBS Access and Sustainability Package, which will bring about a wider range of improvements within the pharmaceuticals sector to ensure ongoing access to innovative medicines through a sustainable PBS. This bill provides for a considerable boost for pharmacy in this country. It includes $18.9 billion of investment negotiated as part of the Sixth Community Pharmacy Agreement. This is a landmark agreement which will ensure that the sector is provided with security for the next five years in terms of funding and pricing.

What is the context of the debate on this bill? The fact of the matter is that every five years there is a renegotiation of the pharmacy agreement. Why? Because, as other members have said, many medicines are incredibly expensive. Some are not too expensive—as we have heard, paracetamol is not very expensive, and we have dealt with that in this bill by taking it out. It is unnecessary, because you can go into Woolies or Coles and buy yourself a pack of 24 paracetamol tablets and it will do the job. You do not need to get it from a pharmacist, but it was being used to help them with thresholds.

I met in my office a delegation of some of these 36 pharmacists that either live in or have pharmacies in the electorate of Canning. They are small business people desperate to put together a business model for themselves but also to provide a service. Matthew Tweedie, the Western Australian representative of the Pharmacy Guild of Australia—Mr Deputy Speaker Goodenough, you may have met him when he came to see you in your electorate—is a fearsome advocate for the guild in Western Australia. Some might even say he is pugnacious, but he does his job very well. The stories that were coming from some of these pharmacists were quite heartrending.

A lot of people think that because a pharmacist goes along to university and gets themselves a degree that allows them to be a pharmacist it is a licence to print money. It is not. Think about it: if they are a young person who has just left university with nothing they either have to go to work for another pharmacist, or, if they set up their own pharmacy, it is going to cost them an absolute fortune not only to set up a building but also to get the amount of goods in the office, and there are all the regulations that go with it.

It is true that pharmacists have had to diversify. There is not a lot of money in providing scripts alone. So what do they do? They have almost become a pharmacy supermarket. Dare I digress, Mr Deputy Speaker? In Cuba, which I recently visited—which has one of the best health systems in the world, I might add—they have a whole range of things you can buy in a pharmacy, from coffees to other things; they are basically delis with pharmacies in them. We do not have that in Australia, but we do have a diversity of goods. So you go in there and, yes, you can buy the stuffed toys and aftershaves and all the trinkets that go with that, like hairbrushes, and that is what is needed.

People say, 'Look at them now, though; they are able to give injections to people.' But, as this delegation of pharmacists said to me, the regulations surrounding that make it almost prohibitive to make an economic model out of it. If you give injections in your pharmacy, you have to get a separate room, you have to make sure you get a qualified person, you have to have a second person there administering and watching—it is a huge cost to do this.

Do remember that not only do the pharmacists have to set up this incredibly large infrastructure to provide the full service, but also they have to deal with their landlords in the shopping centres. For goodness sake! Some of these landlords are some of the most voracious people in the world. They rip these poor guys off in terms of rents, and ratchets on their rents, and everything that goes with it. And they have got to try and turn a dollar before they go anywhere in terms of shopping centres.

As somebody who has been absolutely torn apart in a business myself by the shopping centre management, I feel for these poor pharmacists. To give you an idea of it, in the Waterford Plaza shopping centre, not far from where I live, there is a large pharmacy. So what did the shopping centre management do? They decided to put another pharmacy in, just metres away in the other section of the shopping centre. That first pharmacy was battling to survive. Now the management have put another one in there to compete with them. The landlords are not interested in whether the pharmacy is going to make any money; they just want to fill their shops.

The pharmacy then has to deal with things like the large pharmacy warehouses. I do not know if you, Mr Deputy Speaker Goodenough, have been into a large pharmacy warehouse, but writing scripts and giving medicine is not their core business. You go in there and you find all the other voodoo medicines—the pills and the vitamins and everything. There is one product that will give you hair and another that will take your hair away; there is one that will help you with sores and another that will create something else; there is one that will help you lose weight and another that will help you not lose weight. They have to sell all these diet products. They are festooned with all these things, but they do not provide a service.

A genuine pharmacy in the suburbs, like those in my outer metropolitan electorate, is needed, because when someone goes to the doctor and gets a script they need to fill it. That is what people are really looking for. But these pharmacies do more than that. As we know, they help manage people's medicines. They even put together things like Webster packs which allow the elderly in particular to make sure they get the right medicines in the right dosage at the right time. But they not only do that; they also go and deliver them to the patient's house. Can you imagine the pharmacy warehouse doing that? They would have no idea. They would not be interested; it is all about bulk and turnover.

I do not have a problem with large pharmacy warehouses. They have got their place. But it is the difference between going to a nice little boutique cafe on the corner and being willing to pay a bit extra to get a service, and going to the great cafeteria on the corner where you have got many tiny little restaurants housed inside some food hall and you can have a choice and have it as cheap as chips. This is the difference between a decent pharmacy and those.

In my outer metropolitan electorate, sometimes, in the towns, as the member for Grey mentioned, you would be lucky to have one pharmacy in a small town and they are battling to survive. I have a town called Serpentine in my electorate. The local people there have been battling for years and years to get access to a doctor and get access to medicine at all. We were lucky enough to get a couple of Nigerian doctors to go down there, and they set themselves up in the local pony club of all things. But the problem was: when the doctors wrote scripts, patients had to go off to a town 30 or 40 kilometres away to fill the script. Dare I say it: as soon as these two doctors got their medical provider numbers, they went straight back to the city with them and left the town without a doctor. But, thank goodness, at the moment in Serpentine there is a pharmacist who has come there, selling pharmaceutical products largely, because there probably is not a lot. When you put all that other stock in—the stuffed toys and the vitamins and everything—you have got to have a fair old bank overdraft to make sure you carry that sort of stock.

Those are the realities of trying to set up a pharmacy in an outer metropolitan area and make it work. One of these gentlemen who came to see me, along with Matthew Tweedie and the people from my electorate, was telling me that, by the time he pays all of his bills and the set-up costs and the loans, he is battling to make $40,000 a year. That does not pay the bills. That does not feed the kids. That is battling to run your car. So there has to be a decent pharmacy agreement. This is what this sixth agreement was about.

Those opposite have been saying in their speeches in the House today that there has been no consultation from this government side of the House. That is totally untrue. The previous minister, Peter Dutton, began the consultation process on the sixth agreement. And the current minister, Sussan Ley, is doing an outstanding job. She is somebody who is incredibly approachable and somebody who has a great disposition to dealing with people and consulting. I have rung the minister on this issue and she is going to come to my electorate, along with the member for Hasluck, and sit down and meet with a delegation of these chemists. Even though the agreement is finished and over, she is committed to doing that. That is the sort of person she is: she is interested in the minutia of the detail. She is interested in making sure that she is taking a practical measure. As another speaker said, it probably has something to do with coming from the bush herself, from the seat of Farrer. There is no vast metropolitan area there. People need pharmacists in their area not only to hold the town together but to make sure there is a decent service.

So, when we hear about lack of consultation we just need to remember and put into context that on the eve of the last federal election, the Labor Party cut $800 million of funding from the pharmacies without any consultation whatsoever—not at any point in the discussion. That is what are dealing with: one who has had the discussion and one who took the money without a discussion. That is the difference between us.

As I said, this bill does put about 20 per cent more into the agreement over five years—to $18.9 billion. The member for Lyne, who is a doctor himself—an eminent doctor; he has probably taken a huge pay cut to come into this place—pointed out the business about the concessional co-payment dropping from $6.10 to $5.10. For those who use 40 scripts a year there is a potential saving of up to $40. That is a concern for pharmacists. As he said, if somebody does 60,000 scripts a year—which is not unreasonable—that is $60,000 off the bottom line, trying to make that work. Remember: it is not mandatory, it is negotiated. So if you actually want to do this and be sure that you are viable then I am sure the person is quite happy to pay the extra dollar—sorry about that noise, Mr Deputy Speaker Goodenough! I was getting so excited that I pointed this out too strongly! This is voluntary, but it will affect the chemists.

To all the chemists out there, I have spent a lot of time talking about the pharmacists themselves—the practical measures without a lot of the detail. I know that a lot of my colleagues have done that so there is no point in me rehashing what has been said before. What I do need to say in the last few moments is that this pharmaceutical agreement is something that the rest of the world holds in high regard. We deliver affordable medicines to the Australian people because we can. We are a rich and affluent country, but we have to be careful about how we use our taxpayers' money. We do it in a proper way, where we renegotiate with the major pharmaceuticals, and at the end of the day we deliver a good result for the constituents in our electorates.

As I said, we had the delegation in Canning. One of my local pharmacists, who owns two pharmacies near my electorate office—Natalie Smart, who owns the Wizard Pharmacy and another one—felt that this pharmacy agreement has gone a long way. Obviously, in an ambit claim you are not going to get everything. But they got a lot, thanks to the minister and the negotiation that the minister did on this agreement.

Ms Smart, the local chemist, said that she was particularly happy with the additional government investment in patient care programs and dosage delivery aids, such as Webster-paks. We are delivering real benefits to the community and that is what we intend to do well into the future. This is a government that is interested in value for money and in providing a decent and proper service. I commend the bill to the House.

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