Mark Butler (Hindmarsh, Australian Labor Party, Deputy Leader of the House) Share this | Hansard source

Speaker, as you know, I love a question about bulk-billing. I absolutely love it, and I've been waiting for one. We're more pleased to talk about bulk-billing than maybe any other policy in Medicare because, for us, bulk-billing has been at the beating heart of a system of universal health insurance generationally opposed by those opposite. And the Leader of the Opposition is right; when we came to government, it was in freefall. The Leader of the Opposition had a bit to do with that. As a health minister who never increased the Medicare rebate and as a health minister who extended the freeze from her predecessor for four long years, the Leader of the Opposition knows a bit about why bulk-billing was dropping.

But the record investment we made in 2023 did have the desired effect on bulk-billing for concession card holders. It's back to over 90 per cent. But, as we have said, it has continued to drop for people without a concession card. That is why the Prime Minister made a commitment to extend bulk-billing relief, in November—not now; in November—to all patients, to every single Australian. Clinics are already telling us that they'll be moving to a full bulk-billing model.

Now, I've been a little puzzled by the coverage over the last couple of weeks that a quarter of clinics would not move to 100 per cent bulk-billing, as if that was some revelation. It was actually in our media release in February, because that was the modelling that the department put in place. But then I was even more puzzled by the opposition seizing on this as some great, new deception by us, because it was their policy as well, and I'd imagined that the leadership group that got together, when we announced the policy, to consider whether or not they'd support it, might have actually asked some questions. Sitting around with their 'Peter Dutton for PM' keep cups, they might have asked a couple of questions about the policy they endorsed half an hour later.

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