Carina Garland (Chisholm, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

As someone who grew up in a household where my parents ran their own medical practice, the importance of universal public health is really something that has been instilled in me from a very young age. I'm really excited to stand here today and speak about legislation that will see, for the first time since the creation of the PBS, patients paying less for medicines.

Unfortunately, we are in the midst of a cost-of-living crisis inherited from the previous government. Anything we can do to alleviate cost-of-living pressures on families is really important to my community and, indeed, to communities across Australia. Health is really important to my community, as I'm sure it is to the communities of all of my colleagues here today. In my electorate of Chisholm there's some really the exciting news around health. The Victorian Heart Hospital, which was funded by the Victorian Labor government and Monash University will open its doors shortly. It is the first and only cardiac hospital in Australia. And we recently turned the sod for Moderna in my electorate of Chisholm too; they will join Pfizer as just two of the pharmaceutical and medical technology companies to set up business in my local area. So the importance of health, medicine and an accessible, equitable and well-funded health system really matter to my community.

Shortly, we will also see the National Reconstruction Fund debated in this place. This is a really important policy that we took to the last election, and it was very well received my community. We have all experienced the global shortage of medicine due to disrupted supply chains and also due to the failure of investment in sovereign capability and domestic manufacturing capacity. These are the high-wage, high-skill jobs of the future. On our watch, we will see this kind of advanced manufacturing revived once again, providing the good and secure jobs that our communities rely on and, more than that, making the kinds of things, like medicines, that our communities need. I think everyone was really shocked at the extent to which we were unable to make things here in Australia, so I'm really pleased that's going to change under our government.

Labor governments, including the Albanese Labor government, have always invested in and defended public health in this country. Of course we were the first people to bring in universal health care in Australia, and had to reintroduce it after it was, unfortunately, abolished by the coalition. What we're doing with the copayment bill—which I'm excited to speak about, because it's already making a difference to hip pockets—is saving people money. Not only are we saving people money; we're removing the horrible choice that people have to make between whether they go to the pharmacy and pay for life-saving medications or they pay for their groceries or their rent or their petrol. This is a choice nobody in a country like Australia should ever be forced to make. We should be protecting our universal healthcare system and making sure it is equitable for everybody. Now, instead of paying what they used to for medications if they had one script that needed to be filled, people will be saving $150 a year. Those filling two scripts a month could save around $300 a year. There are 3.6 million Australians with current prescriptions over $30 who are already saving money.

It is devastating that people have been forced into situations where they are making choices around their health because they might not be able to afford to get access to medicine. Of course, we've also seen people not being able to afford to go and see a general practitioner to get a prescription in the first instance. In fact, over the last decade in my electorate alone—and I suspect the numbers are similar in other places around the country—the out-of-pocket costs that people experience going to a GP increased by a shocking 38 per cent. In that instance too we are seeing people making very difficult and very dangerous decisions about not seeing medical practitioners, because they simply can't afford it. That's not good enough; we're doing better. I'm really pleased that people are starting to save money. We are committed to Medicare. We are committed to equitable, genuine universal health, and I'm really pleased that the member for Robertson has put this motion to the House.

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