Joanne Ryan (Lalor, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Australia is famous for many things, and one thing the world knows about us is our universal health system and our affordable medicines. When people look around the world at where they want to live, our great health system is one of the things that attracts them to our country. It speaks to our sense of egalitarianism. It speaks to our sense of social justice and our commitment to looking after one another and building a fair society. Our universal health scheme is a hallmark of that great society, and I am really proud that Labor had a role to play in the creation of that egalitarian health system, if I can call it that. The National Health Amendment (Cheaper Medicines) Bill 2025 is another piece in that great social enterprise that is our country Australia and one of the reasons people from around the world want to come and live here with us.

In my electorate of Lalor we have a young, diverse, fast-growing community of young families from around the globe, who all love our health system. If you stop on any street corner and start a conversation, it will go to health. Two planks—health and education. That's why people come to my community: 'Affordable housing, and I want a great education for my kids and I want to know that we can access the health care that we need.' This government is committed to making sure that everybody in Werribee, Tarneit, Wyndham Vale, Hoppers Crossing and Manor Lakes has access to affordable medicines.

This legislation is part of that good news story. As of 31 July this year, my community saved $9.2 million because of this government's commitment to cheaper medicines. If you think about the young families that I represent, about the number of times they go to the doctor, about all of the medicines that a family requires, about our model where we front-load preventive health by creating access to GPs, access to emergency care and access to urgent care clinics and providing medicines that families need at affordable prices—if you think of what that means for the long-term health of a community like mine, this is gold. It's more than gold. It's a spend we're not going to make at the other end of this cycle, because healthy children create healthy teenagers create health adults. A Tarneit family filling two general scripts a month will save hundreds of dollars under the change that I just mentioned. This bill provides certainty for concession holders. A Werribee pensioner will pay no more than $7.70 a script, frozen until 2030, with no surprises and no strings attached.

I think about my mum, who lived to be 94, and I think about what our affordable medicines meant for her life. They meant a quality existence. They meant a pain-free existence. They meant that she could continue to contribute, to hold her great-grandchildren, to see the birth of 28 great-grandchildren. That was down to our great health system—seriously, 94 years of age—because she lived in Australia. She had nine children, with eight surviving. She was hard on her body. Her body met those demands. Those medicines kept her well. She was an asthmatic. As a child, she was an asthmatic. Her mother was told when she was born she'd have to be left in the pram because the asthma was so severe. That's not a treatment we would suggest day, under any circumstances, but it's a long time ago. That asthma came back. She grew out of that extreme asthma by the time she became a teenager, but, with menopause, it came roaring back into her life. She was hospitalised in her 60s, seriously fearing for her life. Her asthma medications were a permanent part of her life, from age 60 through to when she left us. How many scripts is that? What would it mean for her to know at 60 that her medications were going to be $7.70 per script on the PBS?

Cheaper, longer duration scripts have also improved medication adherence, preventing avoidable visits to the GP and hospital admissions. These things are happening now under this Labor government, and I am so proud of the work we've done here. I'm proud that we stared down those opposite on extending scripts. We stared them down and delivered. I'm proud of it because I live with someone who has scripts all the time for a condition that won't change, and I know, across the last 15 years, the number of times a script went unfilled, the number of times I was in a conversation that went, 'Your colour's not looking great. Are you taking your meds?' only to be told, 'I'm going to go to the chemist today.' The 60 day scripts will prevent heart failure intensifying for thousands of people in our community. This is good news for everybody I represent. It's good news across Australia.

Cheaper medicines help households in Lalor budget. I often talk about this. As a teacher, I have seen what cost-of-living pressure can do to families. I've seen it, and I've lived it with families, with kids walking into the school gate who've come from a home where the bills are stacking up on the fridge and chaos is looming. Parents lose control of their lives, and that chaos impacts on young people as they walk into the school gate. Anything a government can do to create a positive budgetary frame for families to reduce the pressure of cost of living is a good thing. This legislation is not just about great medicine. It's not just about quality of life. It's not just about living longer. It's actually at that grassroots level of giving people control of their household budgets. It's a cost-saving measure. It's a cost-of-living measure as well as being a health measure.

The Albanese Labor government is providing practical, immediate cost-of-living relief with long-term benefits for every community. Think about it. We come to government, and there's a cost-of-living crisis. Interest rates are spiralling. What do we look to? We look to the things that families need right now, like control of the family budget. We look to controlling the energy costs inside their homes. We look to the cost of medicines. What an insightful decision from our minister for health, to look at recommendations that may have come to previous governments and been shoved aside as not important or not a priority. In this scenario, this government comes into office and embraces the 60-day script, an idea rejected by the previous government, because of what it means in a cost-of-living crisis. It means that you don't have to go to the doctor as often, and it means that we can protect that universal health system that we're so proud of.

As the member for Lalor, I have fought to have the DPA status reinstated for my community. That status was ripped away from us by the previous government, and that saw a 30 per cent drop in GPs in my community. The way the DPA works is that doctors trained overseas—many live in my community—get a DPA-status placement where they work longer hours or after hours so that a clinic stays open until 10 o'clock, staffed by an overseas doctor working to have their accreditation acknowledged in Australia. That is the bread and butter of GP clinics in my electorate, where we train overseas doctors in Australian practice. People get their credentials then buy a house and dig in. They start a practice and the cycle continues. We've reinstated that DPA status in my electorate, and it is making a world of difference to community members because lots of the clinics opened by overseas doctors, who have come to share their lives with us, are bulk-billing every patient who walks through the door. Now they're able to give them scripts that people can afford, and our pensioners and anybody who is eligible for PBS scripts is benefitting from all of that.

This bill will reduce the PBS general co-payment from $31.60 to just $25 from 1 January next year. It doubles down on what we've already done to make those scripts cheaper by bringing them down to $31.60. Now they're going to come down by another 20 per cent. It will slash the maximum cost of PBS medicines. This is going to make another real difference in communities like mine and in communities across the country. It was a commitment we took to the election because we knew that universal health care was a part of Australia's identity. It's about accessibility, which provides the foundation for every cost-of-living measure this government introduces. We're using medicine, health and every measure we can to assist families in electorates like mine to get control of that family budget, to literally get control of their lives and to maintain a level of calm in their homes when they come home from work.

Only a Labor government builds and defends this universal health care—from Whitlam's Medibank to Hawke's Medicare to this bill around cheaper medicines today. Labor made Medicare possible, and we are still the only party that strengthens it when families need relief most. Those opposite may wince, but Medicare stands because Labor built it and Australians back it. Labor doesn't just talk about universal health care; we created it and we continue to modernise it so Australians are not left to decide whether they can afford to refill their scripts or to put dinner on the table. They are not left to make hard decisions that people in other countries make every day. Under those opposite, what we saw was an Americanisation of our universal healthcare system, a system that we're incredibly proud of and that Australians are proud of. It's a foundation of our society. It's a foundation of our egalitarian ethos.

Labor founded the affordable medicines scheme under the Chifley government in 1948 with the aim of subsidising life-saving and disease-preventing medicines for the community. Today this life-changing scheme has been expanded and provides timely, reliable and affordable access to necessary medicines for all Australians. In 2023, Labor delivered the largest PBS price cut in history, and now we're taking it down to $25. This is Labor doing what matters because it is the right thing to do. It's the right thing to do—it's the right fiscal thing to do. It's not just cost-of-living relief. It's not just good health. It's also part of that preventive cycle that saves governments money at the back end. The healthier our population is, the less demand there is on our health system and on our hospital system. When the Liberals were in government, we saw the neglect of our healthcare system. We saw the introduction of co-payments. We saw the freezing of the indexation for Medicare rebates. We saw them strip Lalor, Wyndham and the outer suburbs around the country of DPA status. This was a decision felt deeply by many in my community. I fought to have it reinstated.

I support the health minister on the measures that he is introducing in this piece of legislation. I support the health minister in reinventing universal health care through the tripling of the Medicare incentive. I support the wise decisions being made by this government to keep not just my community but all Australians healthy, supporting them when they need support and making sure that every family across the country can access the medicines that parents and their children and the children's grandparents and everybody in the community needs. This is Labor government 101. Those opposite should take note. They should back universal health care. They should back cheaper medicines. They should support every measure this government is bringing forward not just to reduce people's costs but to keep our community healthy.

Debate adjourned.

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