Gordon Reid (Robertson, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I'll start by saying that the member for Braddon, given some of his comments, has been extremely misinformed, because Tasmania has been a significant beneficiary of the Albanese Labor government's investments into Medicare, bulk-billing and the PBS. Look at the tripling of the bulk-billing incentive. I know that in my region and in the member for Dobell's region, there were over 10,000 additional bulk-billed visits to the GP. Those people are having their chronic medical conditions seen to so that they don't become acutely exacerbated, resulting in their ending up in the emergency department.

Look at freezing the price of medications—the PBS co-payment that's coming up. Look at the cheaper medicines act that we passed early on. I have seen that policy actually work on the ground of a health facility. People are able to afford their blood thinners, their MDIs, their puffers and their diabetes medication. I have seen that work in real time. That is the result of an Albanese Labor government, led by a fantastic health executive who know that Medicare, with universal access to doctors and medications, is one of the most important things that a country can have.

Then we have our urgent-care clinics. I think this isn't said often enough: we are creating a new model of care and a new speciality in Australia—urgent-care medicine. If you are too sick for the GP but not sick enough for the ED, prior to the election of the Albanese Labor government, you would have nowhere to go. You'd be going to an overcrowded emergency department or you'd be going to a general practitioner who is under significant strain from the number of patients that they are seeing in the community. Now you have somewhere to go. I have seen firsthand that these clinics on the Central Coast and across Australia are making a difference.

On the Central Coast alone, there were over 10,000 visits to our urgent-care clinics. Across the country, there were over 400,000 visits to these urgent-care clinics. We're talking about people with conditions like exacerbation of asthma and extremity trauma, as well as unwell children with respiratory disease and gastrointestinal disease. These are patients who would have otherwise gone to emergency departments or who may have been too complex for the clinic of the general practitioner. They would have had nowhere to go, but now they do, thanks to the Albanese Labor government.

These urgent-care clinics are right across the world. They're in other countries as well. We saw this and we recognised this. The health executive and the Prime Minister saw this, and we thought, 'This is going to work in Australia,' and it is working in Australia. This is part of the Albanese Labor government's broader plan to strengthen Medicare right across the board. We're talking about the tripling of the bulk-billing incentive, the PBS co-payment freeze and the provision of affordable medications. We've just signed the recent community pharmacy agreement with our friends in the community pharmacy sector.

We've established these urgent-care clinics, and we're working with universities and with our education institutions to make sure that we can encourage more medical students to pick general practice as a speciality. It is a rewarding career to be a general practitioner. It's a challenging career, but it's a rewarding career. It's one of the only medical specialties where you will see an undifferentiated patient—a patient who comes in with a symptom where you have to figure out what's wrong with them and then either treat and manage them or refer them on to another speciality or to a higher level care centre. It's a challenging but rewarding career. It's a career where you see all manner of patients across the lifespan from babies to the middle-aged and all the way to our young-at-heart Australians. It is a rewarding career and I would encourage medical students across this country to select general practice as a speciality, because you'll be making a difference in the healthcare landscape of this country. Know that, in the Albanese Labor government, you have a Medicare system, and a general practice system, that is supported by our government—it is absolutely supported by our government—whether it be in the urgent care space or with bulk-billing incentives and the like.

But I want to go back to the urgent care clinics, and I think this is really important: over one in four visits are made by someone aged under 15 years. There is a significant disease burden from the paediatric population that would otherwise be going to the GP or the ED that is now going to the urgent care clinics—and they're being seen in a timely manner, which is not only good for the kids; it is also good for the parents and the wider health landscape across the country.

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