Nita Green (Queensland, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

We know that Labor made Medicare and it's only a Labor government that will strengthen and protect it. That is exactly what our government is doing right across the country but especially in Queensland. At the heart of our efforts is a simple yet powerful belief that access to quality health care should not be a privilege but a right for every person, no matter where they live or their financial situation.

One of the most pressing challenges we face as a nation is the growing need for mental health support. Last week I announced in Mackay a brand-new Medicare mental health centre. This is just one of the ways that our government is tackling mental health in this country. This centre will provide free walk-in mental health support for people in distress as well as ongoing care for those with more complex needs. The Mackay centre is just one of 61 Medicare mental health centres being rolled out across the country, with 19 of those in Queensland, including in Cairns, Townsville and the Torres Strait. This initiative is part of our broader commitment to strengthening Medicare and ensuring that every Australian, regardless of their postcode, has access to the health care that they deserve. It complements our government's Medicare urgent care clinics. Just last week in my hometown of Cairns, I announced that our urgent care clinic had seen over 10,000 patients in just nine months. That's an incredible achievement. This is the Albanese Labor government's promise—delivering care closer to home, where it matters most.

Our government is also delivering unprecedented savings on the cost of essential medicines, because we understand that health care comes at a cost, and, during a cost-of-living crisis, this is incredibly important to families. Thanks to our government's cheaper medicines initiatives, Queenslanders have already saved $88 million. These savings are a direct result of the largest cut to the maximum patient co-payment in its 75-year history. Our landmark 60-day prescription reforms have also contributed to these savings. We know how important affordable health care is, especially to those with chronic or ongoing health conditions. By allowing Australians to fill 60-day prescriptions, we're saving them time, reducing the number of visits to the doctor and putting money back into their pockets. Over 10 million prescriptions have already been dispensed under this scheme, helping people with conditions like asthma, anxiety, Parkinson's disease and depression.

We're reinvesting every single dollar from this reform into community pharmacies, ensuring even more health services for Australians. In just two years, our government has achieved what the previous government couldn't do in nine, and that's because those opposite have never been committed to Medicare. We've delivered not one but two of the largest increases to the Medicare rebates in 30 years. That's an incredible $900 million this year alone on top of $940 million last year. This means more funding for GPs, more incentives for bulk-billing and more affordable visits to the doctor for every Australian. I'm especially proud of what that means for regional and rural communities. Since tripling the bulk-billing incentive, we've seen over two million additional bulk-billed GP visits across Australia, with regional areas seeing the largest increases. For families with children under 16, pensioners and concession card holders, this makes a huge difference. In May alone, almost a million extra visits were bulk-billed, providing vital relief to households struggling with the cost of living. In rural and regional Australia, the Medicare payments to doctors have increased by as much as 50 per cent, meaning more doctors are able to offer bulk-billing, and more patients can see their GP for free. This is the Albanese government's commitment in action, making health care affordable, accessible and equitable for all Australians.

Of course, we know that we could not achieve this without working together with health care workers. I want to pay tribute to those healthcare workers that I stood with in Mackay last week, when we announced this mental health clinic. They do some of the hardest work in our community, working with people suffering acute mental health crisis. In 2012, on this day, the Liberal-National government in Queensland— (Time expired)