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

I thank the member for his question. I have very much enjoyed visiting his electorate more frequently in recent times with the terrific Labor candidate there, Claire Clutterham, who, I can tell you, gets health. She gets health. I'm not sure from that question that the current member for the eastern suburbs in Adelaide understands health. But I'm very pleased to get another opportunity to explain to those opposite why we have seen a slide in bulk-billing. I say again: perhaps after question time, go and have a talk to your leader about what happened to Medicare over the last 10 to 15 years. The truth is that those opposite have never supported bulk-billing.

The father of the modern Liberal Party, John Howard, called bulk-billing an absolute rort. He fought it tooth and nail, election after election. When they finally had to raise the white flag on the total abolition of Medicare, John Howard got his protege the Leader of the Opposition to try instead to kill it with a death of a thousand cuts by making sure that every single patient in Australia would have to pay a fee every time they went to the doctor. When we blocked him doing that, he did second best instead. He imposed a freeze on Medicare rebates, which unsurprisingly caused bulk-billing to start to slide. We're trying to turn that around. We tripled the bulk-billing incentive, which is exactly what the College of General Practitioners asked us to do. And, when we did it, when the Treasurer did it in the 2023 budget, the college said that would be a game changer, and it has stopped the slide in every single state and territory. If the member for Sturt had any interest in South Australia, he'd know that the second-biggest increase in bulk-billing since we tripled the bulk-billing incentive has been in his state of South Australia. So I say this: we're not going to take lectures on bulk-billing from a party that has spent 41 years trying to dismantle the universal health mission of Medicare, a system that we created, that we delivered, that we have fought hard every one of those 41 years to defend and—now that we've inherited the mess that the Leader of the Opposition created—that we're fighting hard to strengthen now.

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