Mary Doyle (Aston, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That this House:

(1) acknowledges:

(a) the Government is strengthening Medicare and delivering cost of living relief to Australians; and

(b) that the Government's record investments in bulk billing have stopped the free-fall in bulk billing rates, with Australians accessing an estimated 5.4 million additional bulk billed visits in the past 12 months;

(2) notes:

(a) that Australians have saved more than $1 billion on cheaper medicines, as a result of the largest price reduction in the 75-year history of the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (PBS), the introduction of 60-day prescriptions, and the lowering of the PBS safety-net threshold; and

(b) the continued expansion of the Medicare Urgent Care Clinic network, with almost 80 clinics opened which have seen almost 900,000 bulk-billed presentations;

(3) welcomes the influx of new doctors entering the workforce, with one new doctor joining the Australian health system every hour on average over the past year, and the number of junior doctors electing to take up general practice training increasing by more than 25 per cent;

(4) expresses its concern at the track record of the Leader of the Opposition, who during his term as Minister for Health:

(a) tried to introduce a tax on visits to GPs;

(b) froze Medicare rebates;

(c) cut $50 billion from our hospitals;

(d) said there were 'too many free Medicare services';

(e) was voted by Australia's doctors as the worst health minister in the history of Medicare; and

(f) as a result, cannot be trusted with Medicare; and

(5) further acknowledges that only the Government can be trusted to protect and strengthen Medicare.

When I found a lump in my breast in late 1995 at the age of 25, I went straight to my local bulk-billing GP that morning, and she gave me a referral for a mammogram and ultrasound the following week. I was so grateful to have Medicare to help pay for these tests and to be able to see my GP on the same day I found the lump. I was a casual call centre worker, living in a share house at that time, so I didn't have much money to spare. When the test confirmed the lump as suspicious, I was booked in to see a breast specialist, where she conducted a fine-needle aspiration, and the next day I found out that lump was cancer. The following week, I went to hospital for a lumpectomy and lymph node removal. If I had lived in a country that didn't have universal health care like our Medicare, I'd be in a very bad way financially. The financial burden in some countries without universal health care can cause much worse outcomes too. That is why strengthening Medicare is so important to me and is something I support wholeheartedly for all Australians.

Labor is the party of Medicare. It is in our DNA, and strengthening it is our top priority. At the last federal election, we said that there was no higher priority for Labor in the health portfolio than strengthening Medicare and rebuilding general practice. On the other hand, when the current opposition leader was the health minister, he put a six-year freeze on Medicare rebates, which then prompted the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners to take the extraordinary step of calling on GPs across the country to stop bulk billing in order to maintain the viability of general practice. Again, at the time of the last election, the Hon. Mark Butler said that general practice was in the 'most parlous state in the 40-year history of Medicare'.

Bulk billing was falling off a cliff because of the former health minister and now current opposition leader Peter Dutton's six-year freeze on Medicare rebates. This is precisely why the Albanese Labor government invested in—

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