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

Thank you to the member for Griffith, who has hosted me in Brisbane a couple of times over the last fortnight. We visited the Coorparoo Medicare Urgent Care Clinic the week before last. At the same time, I visited the Carina-Carindale Medicare Urgent Care Clinic, which services the electorate of Bonner.

I was back again last week, at the South Brisbane urgent care clinic, with which the member is very, very familiar. That has been established for a while now. It has seen 35,000 patients. The member and I spoke to a couple of patients, Sophie and Tony, who'd been there separately. Sophie is a mum of young children, and she's been there already three times. She told us how grateful she was to have an urgent care service close to her home so she didn't have to go to the local hospital. She also, as the member knows, managed to take the opportunity to lobby me about some other health funding issues, which just reminds us of the boundless initiative from the south side of Brisbane.

I'm also pleased to report that last week the Caloundra urgent care clinic opened in the electorate of Fisher. I see the member for Fisher nodding.

I think he's saying thank you; I can't quite hear him. It is No. 137 and the last of the clinics we committed to over the last two elections. In 2022, we promised 50 urgent care clinics and we delivered 87. Last year, we promised another 50, and we've delivered every single one of them by the end of June 2026, as we said we would. We've delivered every single one of them. They're all open. they're all operating seven days a week for extended hours, and, importantly, they're fully bulk-billed. They've already seen more than 3.2 million patients.

Now the network is up and fully operating, they'll see about 45,000 people every week, or more than 2.2 million every single year. They're getting high-quality urgent care in their community completely free of charge. Now four in five Australians live within a 20-minute drive of a Medicare urgent care clinic. Really importantly, around half of those patients say they otherwise would have gone to a busy emergency department, so we're also taking pressure off our public hospital systems. From the time the Prime Minister and I first announced this, this new urgent care clinic model has been a central part of our plan to strengthen Medicare—delivering more doctors, delivering more bulk-billing, delivering cheaper medicines and delivering urgent care clinics so we can build a healthier Australia.

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