Michael McCormack (Riverina, National Party, Shadow Minister for International Development and the Pacific) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Today is exactly one month to D-Day for pharmacies, the day, 1 September, when 60-day dispensing comes into effect. This is going to sound the death knell, chemists claim, of many of our rural, regional and, perhaps most disappointingly, remote pharmacies.

A constituent of mine is Luke van der Rijt. He is a good man. He is a pharmacist. He co-owns Southcity Pharmacy as well as a pharmacy at Uranquinty, a village just south of Wagga Wagga. He told me this morning that the new rules for pharmacies would mean fewer jobs for his wonderful operations because he is going to have to cut the hours by—wait for it—20 hours a week. That's 20 hours a week less time for people in the southern suburbs of Wagga, around Glenfield Park, as well as potentially in Uranquinty later on, when he and his co-owners assess the situation of these new rules brought in by this government.

Twelve hundred of the 4,000 pharmacies—

the health minister tells me it's 6,000, but let's just go with 'thousands of pharmacies'—across Australia are in the regions, and some are already planning to close or, as the pharmacist van der Rijt is doing, scale back because they can see, unfortunately, the writing on the wall. An independent report modelled the impact that 60-day dispensing would have on pharmacies, and the report found that as many as 20,818 jobs will go—that's more than 20,000 jobs—665 pharmacies will close and a further 900 community pharmacies will be placed under financial stress. This is simply not good enough.

You don't have to take my word for it, though. You can listen to people like Luke van der Rijt, Michael O'Reilly or, indeed, Victor Vo in Ariah Park. Pharmacies say the doubling of dispensing times from 30 days to 60 days means some patients will get double the medicines they need while others will miss out, and in this day and age that is simply not acceptable. Trent Twomey was on Sky News today, and he's asked the Senate to tell the government to go back to the drawing board with its 60-day dispensing rules. He is imploring the government to do the right thing by our pharmacists, by our pharmacies and by those young people who are now undertaking education at university to be the pharmacists of the future. They need guarantees. They can't have this government doing what it's doing as far as the double dispensing is concerned, because it's bad policy, and bad policy is bad government.