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

Thank you to the member for Barton. Through her work earlier at St Vincent de Paul in New South Wales, every day she saw the sorts of choices that households under cost-of-living pressure have to make, and she's brought that experience, as well as her deep compassion, into this place. In her contribution to the government's cheaper medicines bill, the member for Barton relayed a story of a young mum she met doorknocking in Hurstville—a mum who skips her own medication to afford medicine for her young child when her child is sick.

In a similar vein, the member for Griffith relayed a story that Paris, a young local pharmacist from her electorate in Brisbane, told her about a patient who was cutting her antidepressant tablets in half in order to space them out. Paris's customer juggles medicines for cardiovascular disease and diabetes as well as her depression and struggles to afford all of her medicines. So many of my colleagues told these stories. These stories explain why this government has put so much energy into making medicines cheaper, because cheaper medicines are not just good for your hip pocket—although they obviously are—they're also good for your health.

Australians should not be forced to make choices between filling a script that their doctor has said is important for their health and some other essential household expense. Today, I'm so pleased to report that the House passed the government's cheaper medicines bill, another example of this government delivering on the commitments that we made to the Australian people at the election in May. This law will cut the maximum co-payment for a PBS script to just $25, the same price it was all the way back in 2004, and half the price it would have been next year if the government had not been making medicines cheaper.

This is just the latest wave of our measures to make medicines cheaper. Last term we slashed the maximum amount that pensioners and concession card holders would pay for all of their medicines across a given year by 25 per cent, a measure that has already delivered tens and tens of millions of additional free scripts. We finally delivered 60-day scripts—twice the amount of medicine for the cost of a single script. We have frozen the price of scripts for concession card holders and pensioners all the way to the end of this decade. Those measures alone have already saved Australians more than $1½ billion in co-payments at their local pharmacy counter, but today we showed that this government is determined to do even more.

See this speech in context