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

Thanks to the member for Sturt—the best member for Sturt since Stormy Normy Foster won the electorate back in 1969, the 'Don's party' election. She's already giving terrific representation and service to the beautiful eastern suburbs of Adelaide. and she's making an amazing contribution to the debate around stronger Medicare and cheaper medicines that's deeply informed by her time as a board member of the iconic Royal Flying Doctor Service. Like everyone else on this side, the member for Sturt can well and truly look her electorate in the eye already and say, 'I'm delivering on the things that I promised I said I would deliver.'

This month, she and I visited a terrific GP clinic, the Paramount health centre in Campbelltown in her electorate. Dr Trehan, who runs that clinic, told us that that clinic does currently charge gap fees to some patients to cover the costs of running the clinic. But she also told us that from this Saturday they will start bulk-billing all of their patients all of the time. Tomorrow we'll be visiting another clinic in her electorate making exactly the same shift. Already, some 1,000 clinics have informed us that they will be shifting to full bulk-billing next week after charging gap fees this week. That number is growing every single day, and it's on top of the 1,500 clinics that are already 100 per cent bulk-billing clinics.

But the member for Sturt didn't just promise more doctors, more bulk-billing and cheaper medicines—although she did promise that. She also promised a Medicare urgent care clinic for eastern Adelaide, one of 50 that we promised at the last election. We've already got 90 urgent care clinics operating around Australia, operating seven days a week—extended hours—and, already, more than two million patients have gone through those clinics, one-third of them under the age of 15. Every single one of them has been seen completely free of charge, fully bulk-billed. All they had to take was their Medicare card.

I'm delighted to say to the House that expressions of interest for the remaining 47 clinics have already closed and have already been assessed. We'll be in a position over the next few weeks to make announcements about the locations of those clinics, and I hope that they will all be open by Christmas time. When they are, they'll be relieving pressure on local hospitals, they'll be delivering high-quality urgent care completely free of charge, and they'll be doing what the member for Sturt promised her electorate we would do: delivering a stronger Medicare.

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