Mathias Cormann (WA, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Health Administration) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate take note of the answer given by the Minister representing the Minister for Health and Ageing (Senator Ludwig) to a question without notice asked by Senator Cormann today, relating to chemotherapy drugs.

The Rudd government has been a complete failure in health. The Minister for Health and Ageing, Nicola Roxon, has been a complete failure in the health portfolio. In the lead-up to the last election, we were promised that by the middle of 2009 a Rudd Labor government would fix public hospitals. Labor supposedly had a plan. The buck would stop with the Prime Minister. He was going to work with the states. He had learnt from Labor’s mistakes of the past and was no longer going to go after people with private health insurance. But what have we had? What have we had? We have had a 20-month review on how to fix hospitals. We are now having a review into the review and we are going to have a bureaucratic process into the never-never trying to come up with a way forward in the health portfolio. The minister is completely out of her depth. She has not got a clue as to what she should do to improve our public hospitals in Australia. And we have a government that is spending billions and billions of dollars, that is borrowing money to give it away. But vulnerable cancer patients are being asked to pay the price of Labor’s reckless spending.

The budget measure that I asked Senator Ludwig about was first listed in the budget in May 2008—that is, 15 months ago. The government was going to save $140 million from ‘efficiency measures’, as it put it, in the management of benefit payments for chemotherapy drugs. We asked some very benign questions at the time in Senate estimates. We were trying to find out how it would work, how the government was going to achieve the savings, who would miss out and how it would work in practice. The answer I got about 12 months ago was: ‘It’s still a way off. We’re still working through the detail. We’re going to work with stakeholders. We’ll let you know when we get a bit closer to the time.’ Of course, as we got closer to the time—in the lead-up to 1 July—it was very clear that the government had not done its homework and did not know how achieve the savings without hurting cancer patients. It back-pedalled from that measure at 100 million miles an hour and delayed it to 1 September. Now 1 September is less than three weeks away. There is serious concern among cancer patient support groups and healthcare professionals as to what will happen on 1 September. The minister told us today that the government was going to delay the measure briefly yet again. What does ‘briefly’ mean? How long are you going to delay it for, Minister?

Let me just explain a few things, because the story changed every step of the way. When we first asked questions about it, we were told: ‘There is an unused proportion of a phial of very expensive chemotherapy drugs. If it is not used we don’t want to fund it.’ Community pharmacists are just discarding the unused portions of these very expensive chemotherapy drugs. The reality is this. We are talking about very dangerous drugs. We are talking about people who are in protective gear from head to toe when dealing with these drugs. They treat very carefully something that is no longer allowed to be used after the phial has been opened. We are talking about TGA requirements which say that, once a phial has been opened—even if there is an unused portion in the phial—you are not allowed to use it for any other patient. That unused portion of the phial has to be discarded. It has to be done away with. Then the government changed its story. It said, ‘There are pharmacists out there who are discarding whole unopened phials.’ What a joke. How many community pharmacists do that? What are your figures? What is your modelling? They were not able to answer those questions. No answers whatsoever were available.

The government have been ducking and weaving. They know they have made a mistake. They know they did not think things through. It is the way they usually do it in the health portfolio. They come out with these budget cuts, with Treasury driven initiatives, and the Minister for Health and Ageing goes out there like a propaganda minister, selling the Treasury line, and it is cancer patients across Australia who have to pay the price.

Here we have health department officials now sending out emails to stakeholders telling them, ‘We’re still not ready.’ I will just read this into the record, because it is a disgrace—stakeholders are now being made responsible for the government’s complete failure on this measure. This is what an official from the health department told healthcare professionals across Australia:

… without further cooperation from stakeholders, some of the proposed ways forward are not feasible.

Well, why didn’t you speak to stakeholders before you put this measure in the budget?

The Government is briefly delaying implementation of the measure beyond 1 September, and will provide a further update on its implementation plans in the near future.

We are less than three weeks away. Cancer patients across Australia deserve to know what the government’s intentions are, because we are talking about hundreds and hundreds of dollars for every single dose that people might have to pay out of their own pockets if the government goes ahead with this absolutely ill-considered plan.