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

Thank you to the member for Bendigo for her question and for being such a Medicare champion. The hard work that she has done promoting our Strengthening Medicare agenda in her community means that the people of Bendigo have enjoyed some of the best results in the country. After we tripled the bulk-billing incentives for pensioners, concession card holders and children back in 2023, bulk-billing in Bendigo went up by 10 per cent, the third-best result of any electorate in this country, and our latest investments are proving just as successful in her community. Before November, fewer than one in five general practices in Bendigo bulk-billed all of their patients all of the time. Today that figure is three in five, more than tripled in just three months. The Bendigo Urgent Care Clinic that the member talks about has also seen almost 20,000 members of her community since it opened in late 2024, all free of charge, and about half of them indicate that, if the clinic wasn't available, they would have gone to the local hospital, the Bendigo hospital emergency department. As a result, semi-urgent and non-urgent presentations to the Bendigo emergency department, what they call category 4 and category five 5 presentations, are down almost 10 per cent at that hospital, freeing up the ED staff to focus on the lifetime emergencies that they were trained for and that hospitals were built for.

As the Prime Minister has said, last week he struck an historic agreement with premiers and chief ministers to provide record support to our public hospitals, 750 of them, including the Bendigo hospital, tripling the additional support that hardworking hospitals would receive compared to the agreement that they had struck under Scott Morrison. But that's on top of all of these investments to strengthen Medicare, to deliver high-quality, affordable care to people in their own community, to take pressure off hospitals like the one at Bendigo by rebuilding general practice, by driving up bulk-billing, by rolling out Urgent Care Clinics.

But there is more. As the member says, 1800MEDICARE was an election commitment we made last year. It now provides access to high-quality medical advice 24/7 at the end of your phone, as well as, if appropriate, a direct consultation by a GP on telehealth after hours, all free of charge, obviously. Since we launched 1800MEDICARE on 1 January last month, 120,000 Australians have used that helpline and 5,000 of them have been referred to that GP consult after hours. That is 120,000 in just one month, all helping to deliver the stronger Medicare that the member for Bendigo has been fighting so hard for.

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