Helen Polley (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It gives me great pleasure to inform the chamber that a provider for the Launceston Medicare Urgent Care Clinic has been selected. The Launceston Medical Centre will establish the Medicare Urgent Care Clinic, and they have been seeing patients since 31 July.

Opposition Senators:

Opposition senators interjecting—

Helen Polley (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

We know from the interjections from that side, they want to slam anything to do with Medicare because they don't believe in universal health care for Australians. This urgent care clinic will take a lot of pressure off the Launceston General Hospital, so not only will it help northern Tasmanians and families—instead of having them sit in the ED for hour after hour, waiting to have an x-ray with a child that has a broken arm—but it will also enable them to go to this Medicare funded urgent care centre and not have to wait. They will have access seven days a week and all they will need to get that care is a Medicare card. That's what they need. Not only does Launceston have the first one that's open but there'll be three more for Tasmania, two more in Hobart and one on the north-west coast.

Opposition senators interjecting—

I love the interjections from those opposite, but what the Australian people will see is that the Albanese Labor government is concerned about ensuring that Australians have the best possible health care that this country can provide, and fundamentally underlying that is Medicare, something that those people—it's almost like it's part of their DNA—hate. They want to stand in the way of Labor delivering on all our commitments. That's why they've teamed up with the Greens to stop the Housing Future Fund from being delivered, and 30,000 that could have been built won't be built because of the love-in between the Liberals and the Greens. I'm proud to be part of the Albanese Labor government because we deliver on our election commitments. (Time expired)