Bob Brown (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

When you talk about multiple brand drugs you are really including there the generics that are also available. That includes generics. But you know and I know—we all know—that what begins as a single-brand drug, after the discovery, the research and development and the marketing of it, leads to other companies picking up on the same drugs and producing them later down the line. What we are really seeing here with this division is the opportunity for an exclusion of the generics industry and competitors and a discrete point of lobbying to have new drugs brought on the market.

I asked about reference pricing. Under the existing system, if you are going to bring a new drug onto the market that is going to fix rheumatoid arthritis, there are lots of drugs there at the moment that will look after components of that. The reference pricing system says that you have got to be able to show that this is going to do better: it is going to alleviate pain, reduce stiffness, increase mobility or have much less side effects than drugs already existing on the market if you are going to get there. Is that still going to be the same or is this medicines working group going to be able to look at any new brand drugs that come onto the market? Where is this reference pricing system, which is so central to the PBS, brought into the discussions of the access to medicines working group and how is it divined there?

Let me ask this question: when the department goes to meet up with these drug corporations in this group and the drug corporations come along and say, ‘We’ve got this new drug. We’ve tried out. It’s been used in children in Ethiopia and here are the results,’ how does the department counter that? Where is the department’s backup to be able to assess the information being brought forward by the corporations—or is it not going to be at that level? Are they not going to be talking about drugs, per se—that is for somebody else; they are simply talking about the process of how F1 drugs are assessed as they move on to the conveyor belt with the huge power of the drug corporations before them to push their way onto the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme with a great premium going back to the corporation, even though there may be no real improvement on drugs that are already available at much lower prices and on the market and with which doctors and dispensers are much more familiar?