Matt Thistlethwaite (Kingsford Smith, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Foreign Affairs) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

This week my office was informed by the office of the Minister for Human Services, Senator Marise Payne, that our local Medicare office in Kingsford Smith, situated at the Eastgardens shopping centre, will no longer be open and making services available to the community on Saturdays. This is a great shame. The Medicare office in Eastgardens, which serviced my community, was well patronised on a Saturday. The largest demographic in our community is young families, and most of those families have both parents working five days a week, so, if they are to avail themselves of important health services at the local Medicare office, they need access to a service on the weekends. Our local Medicare office was providing that service. Now that will be taken away from our community. This is a great shame and something that is opposed by working families in my community.

It comes on the back of the consideration by this government of the possibility of a $6 Medicare co-payment, a GP tax, as some have described it. In my community, 85 per cent of visits to the GP are bulk-billed. If this $6 co-payment is introduced by the Abbott government, it will mean that constituents in the seat of Kingsford Smith, in our community, will pay an additional $5.6 million to visit their local GP. That is something that those on fixed incomes, the elderly and those on invalid pensions cannot afford to pay for a visit to the local doctor, in a system which is supposed to provide universal health care for all Australians. The elderly person with a crook back or a dodgy knee who relies on regular visits to their GP, the young girl with a mental illness who relies on a regular visit to the GP for prescription medication—these are the people who will be hit by an additional payment of $6 if it is adopted by the Abbott government.

In the 2013 election, the No. 1 issue in our community was cuts to the Prince of Wales Hospital by the Liberal state government and access to good-quality healthcare services. People throughout Australia and in my community want better health services. Unfortunately, this Abbott government is cutting health services by introducing a possible GP tax and closing our local Medicare office on Saturdays.