Michael McCormack (Riverina, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

On those figures, Dr Freelander, 20 per cent are. The Prime Minister is making out as though everybody can show their Medicare card and that will be the only sufficient cost. It's simply not right. We can agree to disagree on that one. I respect you; I've got the highest respect for you, I know you do a wonderful job and your advocacy for health outcomes and better medical provisions is second to none in this place. I acknowledge that and put that on the record. But, in this regard, the situation is that people are having to pay, and pay dearly, for their medical treatment. Often they're families and people who can't afford it, but they have to do it.

Funding into Medicare—this is an important point to make, too—increased every single year under the former coalition government. It went from $18.6 billion under Labor in 2012-13—they were the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd years, and I remember them well; I was in parliament at that time—to more than $30 billion in 2021-22. I appreciate that some of these figures are exponential and some of these just go with the rising cost of things, relative to where they were, but Medicare bulk-billing was higher under the coalition. Bulk-billing rose consistently across our entire term of government from 2013 to 2022. It rose to 86 per cent before the COVID-19 pandemic and it was at a record high of 88 per cent when we left government in May 2022. In the coalition's last year in government, $167.2 million in free GP services was delivered—$61 million more than the previous Labor government. Those statistics speak for themselves. They're on the record. I'm not making them up; they're right.

We want to see people able to live in a happy, healthy and safe society. Whilst I appreciate that this legislation to remove the fees imposed on the pathology sector for certain categories of pathology applications will be supported, and it's good, the fact remains that there are a lot of fees and costs relating to seeing a doctor—if you're lucky enough to have one—that are being imposed on the Australian public. No amount of the Prime Minister waving a Medicare card in question time or anywhere else is going to take away from that fact.

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