Louise Miller-Frost (Boothby, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Minister for Health and Aged Care. How is the Albanese Labor government delivering better health care for women? What has been the response to the government's policy?

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

I wish standing orders allowed the Assistant Minister for Health and Aged Care to take this question. She worked so hard on this package. But I am delighted to take the question in her stead from the member for Boothby, who is such a terrific advocate for good health policy in her community in Adelaide and in this chamber.

This government has no higher priority than strengthening Medicare, and you simply can't be serious about strengthening Medicare without being serious about women's health. Women consume about 60 per cent of all health services in this country and they face significant costs, as every woman in this chamber and at home knows, simply because they are women, particularly costs around contraception and reproductive health and costs during the period of perimenopause and menopause later in life. Two really important Senate inquiries over the course of this term of parliament have shone a spotlight on the decades of neglect, inaction and poor service that women have received in these two areas. The assistant minister worked so hard with her advisory council to workshop solutions to this.

Yesterday was a great day for women's health in this country. Finally, we reversed decades of that neglect and inaction and have delivered women more choice, better affordability, lower costs and better access to high-quality services. We are delivering more choice and lower cost in the important area of contraception. We have some of the highest rates of unplanned pregnancies and terminations in the developed world. We have declining rates of prescription of oral contraceptives. We have the some of the lowest rates of access to IUDs and implants in the developed world. The reasons for that are pretty clear. They are very hard to access and too often they are far too expensive. This package changes that. There's more training for GPs on insertions and removals, higher fees for doctors providing those services and, as the Minister representing the Minister for Women said, the first new listings on the PBS for oral contraceptives in more than three decades.

The menopause inquiry also showed decades of poor literacy in our healthcare system and poor service for women going through perimenopause and menopause. Doctors are provided only one hour of training on menopause across their entire six-year degree. Again, we will provide better training, better clinical guidelines and better funded Medicare services.

Unsurprisingly, this package has been broadly welcomed by doctor groups, nursing groups, pharmacy groups and, most importantly, women's organisations themselves. We're so grateful for that support and so grateful for the input that they are having. This will truly deliver women more choice, lower costs and better services in the future.