Ged Kearney (Cooper, Australian Labor Party, Assistant Minister for Health and Aged Care) Share this | Hansard source

I'd like to thank the member for Mayo for introducing this incredibly important issue today in the MPI. It is an honour to speak with you all about the inequities in women's health. I worked in the health system myself for a long time. Funnily enough, I've been a woman for a lot longer. As a former nurse and, now, as the assistant minister charged with women's health I'm honoured that, every day, women share their deeply personal and often painful stories with me. I thank the Minister for Health and Aged Care, who is here with me today, for working so closely with me and initiating a lot of the policies that we have so far.

The reality is that life-altering inequities persist for women in our health system, as outlined by the member for Mayo. These, of course, are exacerbated if you live in rural or regional locations, if you are from the LGBTIQA+ communities or if you are a migrant woman. I've made it my mission to address these systemic challenges, and I want to take a moment today to reflect on how far we've come in just two short years of government.

Finding solidarity across social media, women are showing up in droves to tell their stories, using the hashtag #MedicalMisogyny. Too many women know how this story goes: having pelvic pain so debilitating it's impossible to go to work or school; being told paracetamol will do the trick or just use a hot water bottle; being sent away with no guidance on the unbearable night sweats, mood swings and often flooding periods of menopause. To quote the endometriosis activist Gabrielle Jackson:

Women are in pain … they're in pain with their periods, and while having sex; they have pelvic pain, migraine, headaches, joint aches, painful bladders, irritable bowels, sore lower backs, muscle pain, vulval pain, vaginal pain, jaw pain, muscle aches … But women's pain is all too often dismissed, their illnesses misdiagnosed or ignored.

One of my main focuses since joining this place has been tackling this medical misogyny. Medicine and medical research carries the burden of its own history—as deeply social and cultural as it is scientific. Women are not just small men, but medical research and the medical profession has historically treated us as such for centuries. Women were routinely excluded from drug trials until as late as the 1990s. It stands to reason that we've ended up with a healthcare system made by men for men.

Under the former government, male applicants for medical research funding received 67 per cent more total funding than women applicants. That's an additional $95 million every year. When we came to government, the minister for health tasked the National Health and Medical Research Council with achieving gender equity in its grant scheme. I'm thrilled that the NHMRC has met its target of fifty-fifty funding for men and women researchers across all levels of experience and seniority. We're also driving improvements in historic gaps in research representation through the NHMRC's Statement on sex, gender, variations of sex characteristics and sexual orientation in health and medical research. Earlier this year we invested up to $25 million through the MRFF into the impacts of fertility treatment, new predictive markers of pregnancy loss, and the impacts of perimenopause and menopause. Equal gender representation in research means research is informed by a diversity of experience, and this benefits us all.

As I deliver this speech today, I am reminded of my cousin Resa. At 60 years of age, Resa presented to an emergency department with numbness and painful tingling from her waist down. She was dismissed as unimportant. She was not even examined. She was sent home with paracetamol. She died that night, alone, from a ruptured aortic aneurysm. I can't help but think: if Resa had been a man in a suit and tie who had turned up at the emergency department with the exact same symptoms, would he have been turned away?

As women, we are twice as likely to die of a heart attack and half as likely to be adequately treated for pain. We're twice as likely to reject a hip prosthesis, because it's designed for a man's pelvis, not a woman's. We are more likely to be overmedicated, because clinical trials have been done historically on men. I could give more and more examples of that, but time doesn't permit that today.

What I do want to say is that our government is committed to amplifying the voices and experiences of women. That's why we conducted the #EndGenderBias survey, a survey of 3,000 women, healthcare professionals and peak stakeholder groups. The results were shocking but not surprising. Two out of three women reported healthcare related bias and discrimination. Women consistently reported feeling dismissed and disbelieved and being stereotyped as hysterical, a diagnosis that was only removed from official diagnosis list in the 1980s. They've been told they were faking it, doctor hopping or drug shopping.

The Albanese Labor government is acutely aware of these problems, and that's why we set up the National Women's Health Advisory Council to provide expert strategic advice directly to the ear of government. I have the privilege of chairing the council, guiding Australian expertise to provide targeted and effective health care for Australian women. The council established subcommittees to focus on four key areas: empowerment; safety; research; and access, care and outcomes. Together with the council, the subcommittees have been driving work on improving health literacy, workforce training, research gaps and priorities, and safe and equitable access to health care.

This is all critical work, because, as many women well know, merely being a woman indicates a higher risk for some of medicine's most challenging conditions. We are more likely than men to develop rheumatoid arthritis, be diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, develop Alzheimer's disease and suffer chronic pain conditions, and I haven't even started on menopause. There is a whole MPI alone on menopause and that is why we were pleased to co-sponsor a Senate inquiry into that very condition. Yet the conditions affecting women are the ones that have been historically underfunded.

Guided by the council and the testimonies of women around Australia, our government is putting our money where our mouths are on women's health. We have made critical investments in a range of women's health initiatives, including over $100 million to support women with endometriosis and pelvic pain by establishing 22 specialist endometriosis and pelvic pain clinics. We added two additional Medicare items to extend consultation times for specialist gynaecological care and $48.2 million has gone towards the elimination of cervical cancer, including launching the first national cervical screening campaign in more than 20 years. We've made it easier for women to get continuity of care through their pregnancy and birth with an endorsed midwife as part of a $56.5 million MBS package. We've invested $9.5 million for Australia's first-ever dedicated funding package or miscarriage, including collecting data, bereavement support and education. There has been $1.2 million invested to support healthcare professional training on menopause, free period products to remote First Nations communities, all of this on top of Labor 's reforms to paid parental leave, child care, family and domestic violence supports, housing, closing the gender pay gap, because women's economic and social freedom are key determinants of health.

Our position is clear: Labor invests in women's health. Yesterday we heard the Leader of the Opposition chastised by his own party room for a growing anti-abortion sentiment yet he still hasn't called for his own party senator to withdraw harmful anti-abortion bills from the parliament. Rather, Peter Dutton, the Leader of the Opposition, chooses to play a dangerous game of politics with women's lives—fitting for a man voted Australia's worst-ever health minister.

I would like to reassure women that their sexual and reproductive health care is a priority for the Albanese Labor government. We have no higher priority than strengthening primary care and ensuring women can access health care whatever it's about, wherever they are. Women deserve to have choice over their bodies. They deserve to have access to their preferred contraception and fertility care, and they deserve a health system that understands their needs, that supports their needs and their rights to have agency over their body.

We welcome the TGA decision to remove a number of restrictions on health professionals who prescribe and dispense Ms-2 Step. This sits alongside a suite of investments in women's reproductive health care. We have kicked off a gender audit of the Medicare Benefits Schedule, developed a contraceptive decision-making tool, are funding the AIHW to develop a national sexual reproductive dataset and we are funding scholarships for IUD insertion training because it is a surprise to some doctors that it can hurt. We are steadfast. Access to contraception, abortion and fertility services are essential health care. Every woman I talked to has a story. We owe it to the women who suffered—and those who should never have to—to be bold, to be fair and to have ambition for women. If anyone is going to do the work for women, it is this government.

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