Marion Scrymgour (Lingiari, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Minister for Health and Ageing. Minister, how is the Albanese Labor government making medicines cheaper for all Australians after a decade of cuts and neglect, and how are patients benefiting from new treatments listed on the PBS?

Mark Butler (Hindmarsh, Australian Labor Party, Deputy Leader of the House) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Thank you to the member for Lingiari. Like everyone on this side, I am so enormously proud of that great Labor legacy, the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme, that was achieved by a Labor government decades and decades ago against the opposition of the Liberal Party at the time and against the opposition of groups like the then British Medical Association. But we stuck to the fight, and it's delivered one of the best medicine systems in the world. Since we came to government, we've added 400 new or amended listings to the PBS, terrific listings like reproductive health medicines, menopause treatments, cancer treatments and so many others. All of them are fantastic additions to the therapies available to Australian patients.

But, I have to say, none of them are more exciting than the listing I announced on Sunday for whole-of-cancer eligibility for an immunotherapy called Opdivo and Yervoy. This has been saving thousands of lives here in Australia and hundreds of thousands across the world for several years now, and we've been struggling to get a listing that would allow clinicians to make that drug available to everyone with any type of cancer. This is going to be particularly important for those rarer cancers where it's very difficult to put together a clinical trials case for a specific listing.

I joined a constituent of mine, Josh Galpin, in the western suburbs of Adelaide. He'd had a relatively minor melanoma. It had been treated. He thought he was all fine. Then he went into hospital in his late 30s to discover he was riddled with tumours through a range of different organs. He could have had chemotherapy but with very little chance of survival. He could have had some inhibitors that are on the PBS and maybe would have survived for two years. But his clinician Professor Roberts-Thomson recommended Opdivo and Yervoy which has largely cured all of these tumours. He's seen his oldest child graduate high school and his other two children get into adolescence, but he had to pay $100,000 for that. His parents deferred their retirement. His nan lent him some money. His workmates did a crowdfunding campaign to get that money together. When he joined us at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital on Sunday, he said this PBS listing would mean thousands and thousands of Australians from now on won't have to go through that. They won't have to deal with the financial pressure in addition to the trauma of potentially not surviving your children's schooling years.

This will benefit about 5,000 Australians every single year. It is the first listing of its kind anywhere in the world. These immunotherapies are life-changing and life-saving. Not only will it now mean that no-one pays $100,000, but they'll be paying cheaper scripts thanks to this government.