Tim Wilson (Goldstein, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Minister for Health and Aged Care. Will the minister update the House on what the government is doing to improve affordable medicines and access to Medicare medicines for all Australians? Is the minister aware of any alternative approaches?

Sussan Ley (Farrer, Liberal Party, Minister for Sport) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Goldstein for his question. It is always a pleasure to emphasise this government's commitment to available affordable medicines and Medicare in general: our $4 billion increase in spending over the next four years, our $95 billion investment in public hospitals in the current five years, our determination to constantly make medicines affordable to all Australians. As I often say, the Labor Party's dirty secret behind the dirty 'Mediscare' lie is that there actually was no Labor health policy at all. In the absence of a Labor health policy—you would think that Labor would have a health policy on an important area such as medicines—I have had to go back to a previous minister for health in a previous Labor government. I quote:

The Health Minister, Nicola Roxon ... makes no apology for deferring the listing of a number of critical drugs on the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme ...

Health minister Nicola Roxon said:

Ultimately I think the important point is that we can't in every instance guarantee that a drug will be listed immediately because there are financial consequences for doing that ...

That is exactly the approach of Labor: we cannot guarantee that we can list breakthrough medicines and breakthrough cures.

By contrast, this government has never shied away from that task. The commitment that we made when we came to government we have never stepped away from. I want to demonstrate that with an important listing: the biggest ever listing on the PBS was $1 billion for four medicines to cure hepatitis C in Australia—Harvoni, Sovaldi, Daklinza and Ibavyr. The four medicines between them comprise 12 weeks of taking the tablets, the treatment, and it actually is a cure. We are the first and probably the only jurisdiction in the world to make available this cure to every single Australian, without fear or favour. As Bob Geldof said, 'Stigma, shame and fear can suffocate awareness' in hepatitis C. So our approach was for every individual, wherever they are. We know that there are ordinary people like us who have contracted hep C, but there are many people on the margins who have hep C. It is overrepresented in the homeless, in injecting drug users, in remote communities, in the Indigenous population, in prisons. So I wrote to every single state health minister to say, 'I want you to make these cures available to every single person—to the homeless, to those in prisons, to those who are disadvantaged, to those in drug and alcohol cliques. That is part of the government's $1 billion spend on medicines for hep C. That is unprecedented in this country.

The point I make is that, in the absence of a medicines policy from the opposition—and I invite them to actually provide their medicines policy any time—we know that only a government that carefully manages the national accounts can manage this investment.