Gary Humphries (ACT, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I have to say that I think that the government, the then opposition, wanted to obtain the assurance of the sector that it was against this dreadful cost recovery measure, wanted to neutralise opposition to it perhaps at the last election and then bring this measure forward subsequently when it was in government. It suddenly needed to find those dollars that it had promised were somewhere else, salted away in the bowels of an inefficient department of health, and then it discovered the dollars were not there at all when it got to the government benches. The other point of course is that this measure, to the extent that it adds to the cost of medicines, will fuel inflation. It has also claimed to be the low-inflation party. We have seen no indication of it actually honouring or supporting that claim in anything that has been done in its first budget.

I note that the Australian Greens have moved some amendments to the legislation. The opposition will be supporting those amendments. I am not sure that Australia needs another review but that is what an amendment does deliver. I will point out, however, that in reviewing the things that this amendment foreshadows—such as the average number of times a submission is presented before gaining approval, the average cost of submissions by type of submission, the number of applications received for non-orphan drugs et cetera—it does not, and obviously cannot, encompass a review of the number of drugs which are not presented for exemption. It cannot find out, by such a process in any case, how many times drug companies decide that particular drugs are too low-volume to warrant taking to the marketplace, if they have to meet a cost in actually bringing them to that marketplace.

I note that these late regulations provide a capacity to waive fees, and that is good, but my reading of these regulations—and perhaps the minister can indicate whether I have misread them in some way—is that the fee has to be paid at the time that the application is made, or shortly thereafter, and a decision is made independently as to whether the fee can be waived. If the fee is not waived after the application is made, there is no capacity by the applicant to withdraw the application on the basis that it would not be economic to proceed with that particular application. In other words, if you are a drug company and you have a low-volume drug that you want to introduce to the marketplace for a handful of people who happen to need that drug and you think, ‘It might be worth putting this forward, but we don’t have any certainty that we’re going to end up with the fee being waived,’ you might just as well say, ‘In that case, let’s not worry about it. It’s only a handful of people that this would benefit. We will leave the drug off the market altogether.’

The regulations say the department may waive a fee payable if the application involves the public interest and the payment of the fee would make the application financially unviable. I would like to know why the government has not said it will waive the fee in those circumstances. If it is in the public interest, why not make it compulsory to waive the fee? If it is in the public interest and the fee would make the application financially viable, why shouldn’t an applicant have the certainty that they will have the fee waived? I think this is an issue which again reinforces the sense that the government is after the money; it is not interested in the long-term Australian patient who uses drugs and the effect of the measures that it has introduced into the Senate.

I am concerned about this. I think that this is a leap in the wrong direction. It was considered by the previous government; it was not proceeded with for very good reasons. I think it is a little bit galling to have the new government, which continually criticised our lack of consultation and our inability to consult with people, now telling us that our consultation, which led to us not proceeding with this measure, was satisfactory for them to make a decision now, three years later, that this measure can go ahead, despite the obvious lack of support from any of the stakeholders in the sector. The Senate should reject this legislation. If it does support it, it should certainly support the amendments and should consider what direction the Labor Party is taking with these sorts of measures. Is it grabbing for the dollars or is it trying to improve health outcomes for the Australian people? The former conclusion is very hard to resist.