Greg Hunt (Flinders, Liberal Party, Minister for Health) Share this | Hansard source

I want to thank the member for Reid, who comes to this place after a distinguished career as a child psychologist who has served many families over many years and helped improve their circumstances. She also managed her own private business, her own practice, and one of the things that she realised was that, in order for a business to be sustainable, it had to be successful and a budget had to be managed. So she saw in 2011 the consequences for patients when the then government ran out of money and delayed the listing of medicines such as Invega for schizophrenia, with the impact on patients around Australia. Fortunately, we have a strong budget and we have a strong economy. Because of that, we are able to make the commitment to list the medicines that the medical experts recommend.

Two weeks ago today I was privileged to join the Prime Minister at the Northern Cancer Institute in St Leonards. Whilst we were there we were able to list a series of new medicines on the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme. One of those medicines is a combination therapy of Avastin and Tecentriq, and this is for lung cancer. It is for 755 patients who have stage 4 metastatic lung cancer. One of those patients who is benefiting from a medicine which would otherwise cost $189,000 and is now available for $40.30 or $6.50 was Pernilla. Pernilla was with us, and she had that stage 4 lung cancer diagnosed after pain emerged not in her lungs but in her hips. She was given a very short future, but she was given access to this medicine and, as a result of that, she saw the shrinking of the tumour and she is with us, we hope, for a very long time.

In addition to that, a medicine—Besponsa and Blincyto—was listed for people with Philadelphia-chromosome-positive acute lymphoblastic leukaemia. There are only a small number of patients—16 patients—but it would otherwise cost them $122,000. By chance, that week I met a patient in my own electorate who benefited from this medicine. As a consequence of that listing, what we see is that there are patients around Australia, including those with nausea following from chemotherapy and another 500,000 patients, who are benefiting from lower-cost medicines that were listed from 1 October. We do these things because we can, because we have the economy that allows it. We do these things because it's the right thing to do. We do these things because, at the end of the day, when you have an economy and a commitment which come together, we're able to save lives and protect lives.

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