Matt Smith (Leichhardt, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise today to take note of the statement made by the Assistant Minister for Health and Aged Care for this Women's Health Week. I recognise that I am the only man speaking on this statement. This should not be unusual. It should not be strange. What is strange is that we as a species essentially sidelined half the population for millennia and thought we would get a good outcome. Making sure women get quality health care like all Australians is not just the job of women, just like it's not just the job of women to call out domestic and family violence or to make sure women's voices are heard in discussions on important policies. It should be expected that men stand with women. Women shouldn't be forced to fight alone for the laws they need. Whether for health care, housing, education, or any part of government big or small, it is the job of every member in this place to make sure it responds to the needs of every single person in our community. Sadly, this has not always been the case in important policy areas.

Health care is one such example. Health care excluded women for much of its history. Even when women were included, there were some gross generalisations made about anatomy, not to mention the horrific health advice given to women such as: delayed childbearing causes illnesses like breast cancer and endometriosis and will be cured by pregnancy. Or we have the situation where women were pegged as suffering from hysteria due to symptoms ranging from anxiety and fainting to shortness of breath and loss of appetite. Perhaps showing that women used to be seen only as obedient wives and mothers, hysteria could also be diagnosed on the basis of impulsive sexual desire or a loss of appetite for sex—diagnosed by men for the purposes of men. In extreme cases of hysteria, the woman may have been forced to enter an insane asylum or undergo surgical hysterectomy.

While this might seem a thing of the distant past, this is not the case. These colossal stuff-ups in our medical history still have real-world impacts today. Diseases present differently in women and are often missed or misdiagnosed, and those diseases affecting mainly women remain largely a mystery—understudied, undertreated and frequently misdiagnosed or undiagnosed. Women still too often experience delayed diagnoses for conditions such as endometriosis and heart disease. They have their pain dismissed and struggle to get support for issues such as unplanned pregnancies, menopause and miscarriage. These bad outcomes are multiplied exponentially when you look at women who are of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander descent or at women living in rural and remote access with limited access to health care. Clearly things need to change.

There are so many tireless advocates championing better health care for women, whether they are dedicated GPs, nurses, midwives or other healthcare heroes. There are so many members of this chamber who I know are committed to delivering better health care for women. It is in part due to their advocacy that Labor has been able to deliver so much positive reform in the healthcare space specifically targeted at women. I will also add that it helps that we are the first government made up of a majority of incredibly powerful, competent and dedicated women. We look like modern Australia.

Our reforms in this space are targeted at delivering more choice, lower costs and better health care for women and girls. The Albanese Labor government has listened to Australian women and announced half a billion dollars of new investments for women across their life span. Hundreds of thousands of Australian women are now accessing cheaper medicines and better health care due to our government's commitments. Those measures include things like more support for women going through menopause, with a new Medicare rebate for menopause health assessments, funding to train health professionals, our first-ever clinical guidelines and a national awareness campaign. This measure also includes the first PBS listing for new menopausal hormone therapies in over 20 years, with around 150,000 women saving hundreds of dollars a year on the listings of Prometrium, Estrogel and Estrogel Pro. We've also delivered the first PBS listing for new oral contraceptive pills in more than 30 years, with the listing of YAZ, Yasmin and Slinda. There are more endometriosis and pelvic pain clinics treating more conditions with the opening of 11 new clinics, and we are ensuring all 33 clinics are now staffed to provide specialist support for menopause. There are new endometriosis treatment options through the PBS listing of Ryeqo. Australian women undergoing IVF will receive earlier and more affordable access to fertility treatment, adding Pergoveris pens to the PBS and increasing the maximum number of pens to four instead of two per script. Importantly, we are delivering more choice, lower costs and better access to long-term contraceptives, with larger Medicare payments and more bulk-billing for IUDs and birth control implants, saving around 300,000 women a year up to $400 in out-of-pocket costs. We can't talk about these important reforms to women's health without also talking about Labor's other important changes to the healthcare system in Australia. Women go to GPs—shocking, I know!—they get medicines off the PBS and they go to hospital, so every step we can take to improve Medicare will benefit all Australians.

For the benefit of those present, let's just run through the greatest hits of delivering better health care for Australians. We've got $8.5 billion to invest into 18 million more bulk-billed GP visits each year, hundreds of nursing scholarships and thousands more doctors in the largest GP training program ever. For those playing along at home, this investment will mean nine out of 10 GP visits will be bulk-billed by 2030.

Other hits include 90 Medicare urgent care clinics across the country, serving more than 1.8 million Australians receiving treatment. Fun fact: in Queensland there have been more than 367,000 presentations through an urgent care clinic, with one of the busiest being the Cairns South Urgent Care Clinic in my region, and we're getting another one for the northern suburbs as well.

We've also delivered 60-day prescriptions—saving time and money for Australians with ongoing health conditions—phased in from September 2023. We froze the cost of PBS medicines, with copayments not rising with inflation at all at the start of this year, for the first time in 25 years. And, just this week, we have been able to pass laws to go one better, and cut the general patient copayment from $31.60 to $25 from 1 January next year. These are bigger hits than Guns N' Roses'. My staff advised me to make a funny KPop Demon Hunters reference instead of Guns N' Roses, but I didn't understand it. They tried to show it to me, but I went with Guns N' Roses. I don't care—I'm generation X.

But the thing to remember here is that the real winners from all of our reform are the Australian people. They're getting cheaper medicines, they're getting more bulk-billed visits to see the GP, they're getting to access Medicare urgent care clinics across the country and, in the case of women, they're getting more access to better health care than they ever have. Instead of just talking the talk, we're delivering real outcomes. The Albanese Labor government is strengthening Medicare with more doctors, more urgent care clinics and even cheaper medicines. We have made the largest investment in Medicare since its inception more than 40 years ago. That's real help—more money in the pockets of everyday Australians.

This year's theme for Women's Health Week is 'Say yes to you'. Too often, women put aside their own health—for care, work, the pressures of kids, the pressures of school, looking after parents, whatever it may be. But I want to say this, and I want to make sure it's being heard: you can't look after others if you're not looking after yourself. These investments allow women to look after themselves, to be who they want to be and to shine the brightest that they can. So, please, look after yourself. For centuries, women's health has been neglected, gaslit and ignored, but we have come to make these changes. So, this Women's Health Week, say yes to you.

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