Katy Gallagher (ACT, Australian Labor Party, Minister for the Public Service) Share this | Hansard source

I thank Senator Darmanin for the question and for her ongoing interest in and advocacy around the importance of Medicare and the role of public health more broadly across the Australian community and how important that is. Since coming to government, under the leadership of the Minister for Health and Aged Care, Mr Butler, the Albanese government has been working hard to strengthen Medicare. We inherited a system that was under enormous pressure and was failing, with all of the data showing that bulk-billing in particular was declining, that people's access to primary care was getting harder and more expensive, and that medicines were getting too expensive. So those have been the areas that we have focused on in our first two years.

Of course, there's been the largest investment into Medicare in its 40-year history; that was our investment in the 2023 budget to strengthen Medicare with the tripling of the bulk-billing incentive, and that bulk-billing incentive, that investment, has provided an additional 5.4 million bulk-billed visits across the country just since we have put that in place.

We have also seen the success of the Medicare urgent care clinics. We said we would establish 50 urgent care clinics at the election. We actually delivered 58, and we have announced an additional 29 to take our commitment to 87 free urgent care clinics. And we know how popular they are. As of last week, we'd had 900,000 visits to urgent care clinics across the country—almost a million visits to urgent care clinics across the country—and half of these patients said they would have otherwise gone to the emergency department. And do you know that all that people need to attend those urgent care clinics is a Medicare card?