Mark Butler (Hindmarsh, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Health and Aged Care) Share this | Hansard source

The Leader of the Nationals asks how that's going. Already more than 600,000 60-day prescriptions have been issued for the price of a single script, saving people money, saving people time and freeing up all of those desperately-needed GP consults. That's why so many other countries have been doing this for years. It's why every doctors group and every patient group supported the government's policy.

I was asked by the member for Calwell about obstacles. Five years ago the former government made a deliberate decision to reject the expert advice to introduce 60-day scripts, making patients pay hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars since that time that they didn't have to pay. Only a few months ago the coalition showed that they have learnt nothing, by voting time and time again in the other place to block access to cheaper medicines for millions of Australians. This is perhaps not surprising from a party led by a man who when he was the health minister tried to abolish bulk-billing altogether and make people pay every time they go to a doctor, tried to cut $50 billion from hospitals and also tried to jack up the price of medicines by up to $5 a script.

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