Mark Butler (Hindmarsh, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Health and Aged Care) Share this | Hansard source

The Leader of the Nationals said we all support cheaper medicines, but, when that advice was provided to the former government five years ago, they decided to do nothing about it. Instead, they required all of those millions of patients to traipse to the pharmacy every single month and, over those intervening five years, pay hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars in co-payments that the advisory committee overseeing the PBS said were unnecessary. This is a policy that will halve the cost of these chronic disease medicines for millions of patients. It's a policy that will improve their health. We have said that every dollar saved by the Commonwealth will be reinvested into community pharmacy. We're in the process of finalising the detail of that, talking with pharmacy groups across the sector, particularly focusing on smaller rural pharmacies to make sure that the impact on those rural pharmacies is mitigated. We want a viable community pharmacy sector. Instead of politicising this issue, maybe the opposition should work with us.

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