Bob Katter (Kennedy, Katter's Australian Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Minister for Health and Aged Care. Minister, you aver that your pharmaceutical initiative halves prescription costs. It also halves the incomes of pharmacists, destroying owner-operator pharmacies and creating a Chemist Warehouse and Terry White duopoly. They already have 40 per cent of market share. Careful, Minister! Isn't this really about greedy doctors wanting medical centres and Terry White and Chemist Warehouse CEOs on a paltry $1.7 million a year wanting the Woolworths CEO's $8 million or the Qantas CEO's $25 million a year? Government-created duopolies to give us cheaper prices—Minister, pharmaceuticals won't help us when we die laughing.

Mark Butler (Hindmarsh, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Health and Aged Care) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the member for his question. I don't agree with a number of the assertions in it. This measure will go nowhere near to halving pharmacy income. On their own data, pharmacists as an industry will earn about $100 billion over the next four years, assuming no growth. They got 30 per cent growth over the last four. These measures, depending on which modelling you accept—the industry's, the guild's or the government's—are somewhere in the vicinity of one or 1½ per cent of that revenue, again assuming no growth.

We make no apology for recognising we've got more to do to deliver cheaper medicines. We've made huge inroads into making medicines cheaper at a time of unprecedented global inflation that's hitting Australian households as it is hitting households right around the world. That's why we accepted the advice—which had been on the books for five years from the advisory committee that oversees pharmaceuticals—to allow people who are often on these medicines for decades, not just years, to be able to get 60 days supply. It's something that will be of particular benefit to patients in rural communities that often travel vast distances to get to their pharmacies.

I don't accept that this is something only sought by doctors groups, although this will have the benefit to the entire health system of offering up millions and millions of GP consults that are currently used just for routine repeat scripts to be used instead by GPs for much more complex health conditions. That's why you're right that all doctors groups have supported this, but so has pretty much every single patient group you can think about: Breast Cancer Network Australia, the Heart Foundation, Asthma Australia, Diabetes Australia, the Lung Foundation, and groups like Council on the Ageing and the National Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Organisation. I could go on and on. But of particular interest to the member for Kennedy will be the endorsement from rural health groups, particularly the National Rural Health Alliance that represents dozens of health groups working in rural Australia.

I agree with the member for Kennedy that it is critically important to maintain a vibrant community pharmacy sector, whether it's operated under a franchise like Chemist Warehouse or Terry White or whether it's fully independent. That is particularly important for small rural pharmacies. As I said in response to the question from the member for Mayo, that is a particular focus of the reinvestment plan that we have. We are talking to members and to other groups in the pharmacy sector about the particular needs of rural pharmacies that might be relatively close to the cities in Modified Monash areas 3 and 4 or areas like the member for Kennedy's, which would be area 7. We'll have more to say about that in due course.