Alice Jordan-Baird (Gorton, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Minister representing the Minister for Women. How is the Albanese Labor government investing in bulk-billing and taking women's health seriously, and what are the risks that this investment faces?

Ms Catherine King (Ballarat, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development and Local Government) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I very much thank the member for Gorton for her question. Her electorate is now home to 23 Medicare bulk-billing clinics, an increase of 10 bulk-billing clinics since we made our record investment in bulk-billing, the heart of Medicare. Both in the member for Gorton's electorate and now in my own electorate of Ballarat, more than 70 per cent of our GP clinics are now fully bulk-billed, joining more than 3,400 fully Medicare bulk-billed practices right across the country, and this matters. This matters a great deal to the accessibility of health care in this country, because we know general practice is absolutely at the core of Medicare.

I also note that at least half of the member for Gorton's constituents have seen their access to health care improve as a result of the $792 million women's health package. Since we announced that just last year, it has been delivering the results for women around Australia that they have been asking for for a long time. In just one year, women have saved $73 million on contraceptives, menopause and endo treatments. Seventy-one thousand women have had a menopause health assessment covered by Medicare. In March, 33 endo and pelvic pain clinics will be up and running all around the country, and by the middle of the year those same clinics will be providing peri and menopause care as well. PBS scripts are now capped, meaning every single woman accessing PBS medications is now paying less for their medicines.

This is groundbreaking work that treats women's health with the seriousness that it deserves, and it doesn't happen by accident. It's what happens when you support women and when you support women to be in the room making decisions in a majority female government with a majority female cabinet, instead of undercutting women who are brave enough to put their hands up to lead.

While we wait for the men in the Liberal Party to draw straws on who their next leader will be, we know exactly what their next leader and the one after that will do to Medicare, because they have form. Liberals always cut our health services and always cut Medicare, and that includes the health services and care that Australian women rely on each and every single day. They let the cost of PBS medicines blow out. They tried to end bulk-billing and add the GP tax, a compulsory co-payment, and, as shadow minister for health, leading the charge, when I stopped that in the Senate, what we then saw was the then government decide that they were going to freeze the Medicare rebate and we basically saw bulk-billing in this country absolutely collapse. They have got form when it comes to health care. We know that the pretender, the person who wants to be the leader, has form on it as well.