Marielle Smith (SA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The Albanese Labor government's budget is about helping Australians with the cost of living and building Australia's future. It delivers more tax cuts, more energy bill relief, cuts to student debts and more houses built around Australia. But critically—and what means so much to my community—our budget makes cheap medicines even cheaper and strengthens Medicare. We're reducing the cost of PBS scripts to no more than $25. Those are 2004 prices. The last time it cost this much, I was in high school.

We will deliver an additional 18 million bulk-billed GP visits each year, expanding the bulk-billing incentive to all Australians and tripling the number of fully bulk-billed practices. We will be delivering an additional 50 Medicare urgent care clinics, including three in my home state of South Australia, with one in the electorate of Sturt, which our candidate, Claire Clutterham, has been fighting tirelessly to deliver.

And, for the women of Australia, we are delivering $793 million worth of investments into their health, because the women of Australia are sick of having their pain dismissed, they are sick to death of having their experiences minimised and they are sick of paying a tax on their health care which isn't shared by the rest of the population simply because they are women. We are adding contraceptive pills like Yasmin, YAZ and Slinda to the PBS for the first time in decades. We are funding endometriosis and IVF treatments, putting MHT on the PBS and taking women's health seriously, as it deserves to be taken. In contrast, Peter Dutton was voted the worst health minister on record by the doctors themselves. He tried to cut billions of dollars out of Medicare once; he'll try it again. When he cuts, you pay. We cannot trust the Liberals when it comes to Medicare.