Julie Owens (Parramatta, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Small Business) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I was pleased to hear the member for Chifley's comments about the $6 co-payment for visiting a GP—the $6 GP tax. His electorate has a 98.9 per cent rate of bulk-billing, the highest in the country. My electorate of Parramatta, which is next door, is not far behind that. In my electorate, 95.3 per cent of GP visits are bulk-billed. That is 1,139,000 GP visits each year that are bulk-billed. An imposition of a $6 GP tax would have a dramatic impact on many of those visits. Six dollars sounds like a small amount of money, but for many people in my electorate and those around it is not a small amount of money, particularly if your family has the flu and you turn up to the GP with your two children in tow.

In this country a person should be able to see a GP when they need to and not just when they can afford to. GP visits are particularly important because it is the first wave of contact with the medical profession. It is the place where early intervention can occur, when GPs and my local community can work to ensure that a condition does not get worse, and a $6 GP tax will only hurt my community.