Ken Ticehurst (Dobell, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is addressed to the Minister for Health and Ageing. Would the minister advise the House how the government is expanding Medicare funding for mental health and what impact this will have on how people with mental illness are cared for in my electorate and elsewhere?

Tony Abbott (Warringah, Liberal Party, Leader of the House) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I do thank the member for Dobell for his question and I acknowledge his strong advocacy, in particular on behalf of allied health professionals and especially psychologists, who now have additional access to Medicare as a result of these measures. This morning the Prime Minister provided details of new mental health services available under Medicare, which are estimated to cost some $538 million over the next five years. There will be, under these new Medicare initiatives, mental healthcare plans from GPs, including the 93 equivalent full-time GPs in Dobell. There will be higher psychiatry rebates for many types of consultations. Most importantly, there will be access to up to 12 individual psychologist consultations and up to 12 group consultations a year for people on mental healthcare plans or there will be access to other allied health professional services for people on these plans, and I point out to the member for Lalor that there are some 10,000 psychologists in Australia, including almost 3,000 registered clinical psychologists, who ought to be able to access these plans.

I want to thank the parliamentary secretary with responsibility for mental health, the member for Sturt, who has been principally responsible for devising this new initiative. Mental health is a very important subject. One in five Australians will at some stage experience a mental health problem; some one in 10 Australians suffer from significant mental illness. So this government is determined not to let these people down. These new measures are a sign of our determination to make a good system even better and a sign of the Howard government’s determination to be indubitably the best friend that Medicare has ever had.