John Alexander (Bennelong, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Minister for Health and Aged Care. Will the minister advise the House how the government is reforming the health system to enable Australians to access breakthrough medicines?

Sussan Ley (Farrer, Liberal Party, Minister for Sport) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Can I thank the member for Bennelong for his question and say how much I have appreciated meeting medicines and medicine device manufacturers in Macquarie Park in his electorate of Bennelong.

Today the government announced that we are taking action to bring medicines and medical devices to Australia faster. Our expert panel has found that it is taking up to two years to get listings from the US or Europe here to Australia. For example, the drug crizotinib, for advanced non-small cell lung cancer, was listed in the US 13 months before it was listed in Australia. Brentuximab for lymphoma was registered in the US 16 months ahead of Australia. Today is World Lymphoma Awareness Day. This is a type of cancer that is on the increase, with a million people suffering and a thousand more worldwide being diagnosed every day.

These were medicines—the two that I just mentioned—that we went on to list on the PBS. In fact, we have subsidised $4.5 billion worth of new listings since 2013—three times as many as Labor. This is part of our commitment to list medicines without fear or favour.

Contrast that with the Labor Party's position.

A previous Labor health minister said:

Ultimately I think the important point is that we can't in every instance guarantee that a drug will be listed immediately because there are financial consequences for doing that …

What I say to the Labor Party is that the human consequences always outweigh the financial consequences. The Labor Party should take careful note of the human consequences of Australian patients and consumers not being able to access list of drugs early enough. It was the coalition that committed to listing without fear or favour. It is the coalition that has a medicines policy that continues with great determination to do the sorts of things we announced today, to make available faster pathways, streamlined applications under special access and provisional applications for new medicines when people are waiting for life-saving breakthrough drugs and they cannot wait the time it has taken up until now for those drugs to be listed.

There are lots of lessons to be learned from Labor's nonpolicy on health. I think one of the important ones is that what you cannot pay for you cannot deliver. Announcements like today's demonstrate that when it comes to affordable access to medicines you simply cannot trust Labor.