Josh Burns (Macnamara, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I'm getting interjections from my own side here! It hasn't always been a squeaky clean record when it comes to ensuring that Australians have affordable health care. You only have a look back at that famous budget in 2014 when the member for Dickson, the now Minister for Home Affairs, was the health minister. It was a different time. It was the budget where—while government members were celebrating over a cigar in the back lounge in the Senate—we found out that the GP co-payment was doing to be heaped upon Australian taxpayers and the Australian people, and that savings of over $1.7 billion would be brought about by pausing the indexation of the Medicare Benefits Schedule and the income threshold for the Medicare levy surcharge and the private health insurance rebate. Patients were expected to pay a $7 co-payment to visit the GP and to pay more for medication through changes to the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme that we're talking about today. There was $252 million of savings by raising the cost of certain medicines on the PBS—$252 million of savings by making medicines more expensive for Australians. So, while we welcome this bill, we do it with a sense of caution. We do it knowing that the government have form in this regard, that their instinct when they first came into government was not to make medicine more affordable but to make it more expensive and to bring in pretty harsh and cruel budget savings measures in order to bring down their cruel budget, which they celebrated over a big cigar.

I think today is a good step. It's a good step that this is about making medicines more affordable and that we in this place can say to the Australian public that, when we look at the PBS, we recognise that medicines can be a prohibitive cost and that we're here to fix this. But, on this side of the House, we also say that we're here to work together, we're here to make sure that medicine and health care are affordable for Australians and, if the government decides to recognise that this is not about politics but rather about good policy and wants to bring forward some of Labor's measures, including cancer treatment and dental plans and dental care for pensioners, then we stand ready to work with them.

I don't want to get too focused on the minister in my last minute in this contribution, but I would say that there have been instances where the minister has promised a big game on the PBS and hasn't delivered. The minister did make a promise to Australians living with cystic fibrosis that they would have access to Symdeko on the PBS as soon as it was approved and, unfortunately, we're now six months on and we are none the wiser on when the government intends to list it or when the government intends to put it on the PBS. So, while we say today that this bill is worth supporting and that we in the Labor Party do support better healthcare measures, we stand ready to work with the government and we stand ready to put forward and to look at some of the things we brought to the last election. And the minister should get on with the job of listing much-needed medicines on the PBS.

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