Mike Freelander (Macarthur, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

One thing I will not do tonight is politicise the argument about the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme. The history is well known to everyone in this place. I think it is absolutely disgraceful that the present health minister is politicising what for 70 years has been a bipartisan scheme, and I will not do that. I've been very pleased to speak on the motion moved by my good friend the member of Dobell. She is someone who has worked as a hospital pharmacist for many years. I'd like to thank the member for bringing this important matter before the chamber and I associate myself with her words.

I'd also like to thank my friends from the other side of parliament, the member for Bennelong and the member for Lyne, for speaking on this motion, together with the other speakers. In the motion, the member of Dobell has hit the nail on the head. It has been the longstanding practice of successive governments to accept and act on the advice of independent experts—the Pharmaceutical Benefits Advisory Committee—when listing medicines on the PBS. If we don't do that, we end up having an arms race of lobbyists who lobby for these respective medications. That is something that we must not do. It also leads us to an exploitative manipulation of our patients. As a doctor, one who has prescribed medications listed on the PBS for now over 40 years, I think that that is the last thing we should be doing. I think it's a great shame that the current health minister has attempted to do this. What we need are evidence based ways of prescribing medications, and that's what the PBAC does with the PBS.

In contrast to what the member for Lyne has said, we don't really know what the long-term benefits of some of these newer listings will be. It appears in the short term that medications such as Kalydeco and Symdeko for children with cystic fibrosis will extend their lives, but there is not enough accumulated evidence to really know that in the longer term. We rely on short-term evidence and the advice of experts to decide whether we should list these drugs. Cystic fibrosis is a dreadful, horrible disease, and any parent who has a child with cystic fibrosis knows what they have to go through. Certainly, at the present time, life expectancy is relatively short, although it is much better than when I started as a paediatric resident in the children's hospital in 1979. We hope that these newer medications will improve lifestyles and life length in the long term, but we really don't know the exact ways and the exact end point. That's why we rely on the advice of experts.

Over recent years, we also have become accustomed to seeing this health minister grandstand and congratulate himself each and every time the government follows the independent advice of the Pharmaceutical Benefits Advisory Committee, and I think that's a great shame. The PBS has enjoyed bipartisan support since it began in 1948. As has already been mentioned, it was started by the Chifley Labor government. As a doctor, I cannot underestimate the significance that the PBS has had on our society since its inception in assisting Australians to access affordable medicines. I want that to continue, and I want it to continue in a bipartisan way. We're now being faced with an absolute tsunami of new medications and new treatments. That will ramp up with the development of the new biologic and genetically targeted medications. I think that KEYTRUDA has already been listed as one, but there are many thousands that will need to be looked at and decisions made about their listing in the next few years. That number is increasing every day, even as I speak.

We need to have a bipartisan, fair and equitable way of deciding which medications to list and which we don't. The health minister sometimes delays listing because of cost pressures. Recently, there was the example of a treatment which was a multipronged catheter for use in a condition called atrial fibrillation. I know—and the minister told me—that they would delay the listing because of the cost pressures. So to get up there and say that because their budget is going so well et cetera is why they list things is rubbish. We act on independent advice, we act on advice that is given to the minister and to the PBS, and that's how it should stay. We should stop exploiting patients.

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