I rise to speak about Women's Health Week and the important progress we're making to ensure women can access the health care they need when they need it. It's an opportunity to celebrate the incredible women and health professionals who are improving women's health every day, but it's also an opportunity to acknowledge the gaps that have existed for far too long, and to talk about what happens when governments decide to do something about them. For generations, too many women have been told that pain is normal, that heavy periods are something you just need to put up with, that endometriosis is somehow just part of being a woman, that the symptoms of menopause are something to quietly endure, and that reproductive health is something women should somehow just find a way to pay for. Too often women have had to become their own health advocates just to get their concerns taken seriously.

Well, the Albanese Labor government is changing that, and we have made record investments in women's health—almost $800 million—to make health care more affordable, to give women more choice and to improve access to the care that they need at every single stage of life. That's an investment that is already making a real difference.

Just last week we celebrated an incredible milestone. More than one million Australian women have now benefited from cheaper medicines through our health package. These women have filled more than four million cheaper medicine prescriptions, saving more than $150 million. That's $150 million that is staying in the pockets of women and families across Australia. Behind that number are one million individual women—women who can afford the medicines they need, women who have more choices about their own bodies and women who no longer have to make an impossible choice between paying for a prescription and paying for another household bill.

For the first time in more than 30 years, new oral contraceptives have been listed on the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme. More than 400,000 women have already benefited from cheaper contraceptive medicines, saving more than $55 million. For the first time in more than 20 years, new menopausal hormone therapies have been listed on the PBS. More than 520,000 women have already used these medicines at the cheaper PBS price, saving $110 million. This is a profound change, because menopause isn't some niche issue; it's something that around half the population is going to experience, yet for years women were left with limited treatment options and too often had to navigate a health system that was not designed around their needs.

Our government is making contraception much more accessible. We've increased the Medicare rebates for the insertion and removal of IUDs and contraceptive implants, and we're reducing out-of-pocket costs for women. We're establishing eight long-acting reversible contraceptive centres of training and excellence around Australia. These centres will help train more health professionals to provide LARC care while improving access to safe, effective contraception. That's about giving women choice, because there should never be a one-size-fits-all approach to women's health.

We're also delivering better care for women living with endometriosis and pelvic pain. There are now 33 endometriosis and pelvic pain clinics open and operating across Australia. These clinics mean women can access specialised care closer to home. Importantly, since 1 July, all 33 clinics have expanded their scope to provide support and care for perimenopause and menopause. More than 137,000 women have already undergone menopause health assessment since it became covered by Medicare.

These numbers matter. What matters most is what they actually represent. They represent women being listened to, women getting answers, women having treatment options and women being able to access health care without cost being the big barrier. That work is particularly important because women's health does not exist in isolation. Health outcomes are shaped by where we live, whether we can afford care, whether we feel safe about accessing services, and whether the health system understands the circumstances that we're living through.

We can see this clearly in my community in Newcastle. The Hunter New England and Central Coast Primary Health Network is doing extraordinary work to make sure that women experiencing domestic and family violence can access health care in a way that's safe, trauma informed and responsive to their circumstances. The PHN has developed specialist training for primary health workers, helping GPs, nurses and practice staff to be able to recognise domestic and family violence and respond appropriately. This matters because doctors' surgeries are sometimes among the few places where women experiencing violence have an opportunity to speak privately about that violence with someone that they trust. Healthcare workers need the skills and confidence to recognise these signs and ask the right questions and then connect women with the right support. The PHN has also developed primary healthcare outreach programs that take the health care directly into refuge and crisis accommodation services in Newcastle, Lake Macquarie and Maitland. That's exactly what a good health system should do. It should not simply wait for someone to overcome every barrier and suddenly walk through the door. It should ask, 'What is stopping this woman from getting the care she needs, and how do we remove that barrier?' For women and kids escaping violence, these barriers can include safety, transport, cost, trauma and the complexity of navigating multiple systems. Taking that multidisciplinary approach in health care and providing a safe and trusted environment just makes a world of difference.

Then there's the remarkable work that's happening through the Hope in Healing Project. This is again a Hunter based initiative, tackling the question of brain injuries caused through family and domestic violence. Mild traumatic brain injuries are often really difficult to detect, and a woman often will not present at hospital. She may have an injury that doesn't appear serious enough for emergency department treatment, but that doesn't mean there's no injury or lasting impact.

This project, led through the University of Newcastle and supported by the Hunter New England and Central Coast Primary Health Network and Port Stephens Family and Neighbourhood Services, is developing a new model of care that can help identify and then support victims-survivors who are experiencing mild traumatic head injuries and brain trauma. It received almost $1 million through the Medical Research Future Fund to trial that model, and it's an excellent example of what can happen with government investment, great local organisations, researchers and community services all working together.

It's an example of why women's health policy can't simply be about individual medicines or individual Medicare items. It's about building a health system that understands women's lives. It's a system that will recognise the relationship between physical health, mental health, safety and social circumstance, a system that somehow understands the experience of violence can have health consequences that linger long after the violence has ended. And it's a system that's prepared to innovate to meet those needs. That's the approach Labor brings to women's health. We listen to women, we invest in the gaps, and we work with health professionals and community organisations. Then we measure whether that investment is actually improving people's lives.

There is, of course, much more to do. Women still experience poorer outcomes in some areas of health. There are still unacceptable gaps in research. There are still women whose pain is dismissed and whose symptoms go undiagnosed. There are still challenges around fertility, pregnancy, postpartum care, cardiovascular disease, sexual and reproductive health, and women's mental health. And that is why the work must continue.

Women's Health Week is also a chance to recognise just how far we've come. For too long, women's health was treated as an afterthought. Under Labor, it's a national priority—whether it's cheaper contraceptives for young women starting out, menopause treatment for a woman in the middle of her career, specialised care for someone living with endometriosis or trauma informed health care for women escaping violence. These are all part of the same principle: women deserve health care that works for them, they deserve to be heard, they deserve choice, and they deserve to be able to access the care they need without cost, stigma or circumstance standing in the way. This is what we're working to deliver, and in Newcastle I'm incredibly proud to see that national commitment being translated into great local action. So this Women's Health Week, I want to thank the women—doctors, nurses, researchers, pharmacists and allied health workers, all of whom are helping to make this amazing change.

Women's Health Week is an opportunity for us to reflect on the experiences of women in health services and the long-overdue progress that's finally being made. Having worked in the health sector, including running women's health services, I think I speak with a little authority, I hope, on the topic of women's health.

Clinical health services are often not designed with women in mind. Pharmaceuticals are designed and trialled on men to avoid the pesky interference of oestrogen on drug actions, which is great, of course, except that those drugs are also used by women, as 51 per cent of the population. Consequently, we don't know if they will work on women or if women will have side effects.

I attended recently a women's health breakfast and we heard a story told by a doctor. When he was an intern his mother called him and said she was having shoulder pain and difficulty breathing. He took her to her GP, which was the first mistake. She should have gone to ED, but he was an intern; we'll forgive him. And the GP diagnosed that it was the remnants of a frozen shoulder. A day later she was in hospital having had a heart attack.

We know that the way cardiac symptoms are taught is based on the male experience of heart attack: crushing central chest pain radiating to the left arm, shoulder or jaw, and shortness of breath. Women don't experience it that way, so women having heart attacks often have delayed treatment, which, of course, can be fatal. A University of Sydney study found that women are half as likely to receive the appropriate diagnostic tests and treatment. It's little wonder, then, that women have a much poorer survival rate than men. Six months after a heart attack, women are twice as likely to die compared to men.

Another woman at that breakfast told us that she had gone to an emergency department with sudden onset of a severe headache, and she was diagnosed with migraine despite having had no prior history of migraine. She was sent home with painkillers. It took multiple medical consults in 11 days and an escalation of symptoms for her to be finally diagnosed as having a stroke. Again, delayed diagnosis and, therefore, delayed treatment had consequences for the severity of her stroke, her subsequent disability and the rehab process.

Men and women do experience illness differently, and the medical services need to cater for both. At the breakfast we were told that men tend to have colon cancer on the left side of the body and women on the right. Yet the scope that is used to look for colon cancer only goes to the left side. Again, this has consequences for diagnosis, treatment and outcomes.

The experience of women in the health system is often one of not being believed. Their pain isn't believed or is minimised. Their symptoms aren't believed, or are normalised. The Greek word 'hystera' means uterus, and is the same basis as the word 'hysteria'. We can see how, even in language, women's health is trivialised and conceptualised as being 'all in her head'.

I worked in the health sector for many years, and amongst other services ran women's health, including BreastScreen SA. I recall taking a call from a woman whose 14-year-old daughter was having her first period and was in severe abdominal pain. I sent a doctor out to her home to have a look, and he told her that it was period pain and this was what it was like. She was crying, guarding her stomach, very distressed, and she was told that this was the future she was looking at for most of her adult life. When she was still getting worse a few hours later, they called back and I sent a different doctor. She was diagnosed with acute appendicitis and sent to hospital for an emergency appendectomy. Her pain had been normalised and minimised, and the rationale of period pain meant she had a substandard medical experience that could have been life-threatening. Statistically, women are more likely to have delayed diagnosis and treatment for appendicitis, and it surely isn't coincidental, therefore, that they also have a higher rate of complication rates following appendectomy. Little wonder, then, that it takes women with endometriosis typically up to seven different doctors and between seven and 10 years to get a diagnosis, let alone an effective treatment plan.

This government takes women's health seriously. Our landmark $800 million women's health package is levelling the playing field, and we are doing this through all of the levers available to the federal government in the health sphere—MBS, PBS, specific programs, services and funding. Since March 2025, more than one million women have filled more than four million cheaper prescriptions for oral contraceptives, menopausal hormone therapies and endometriosis treatments listed on the PBS, resulting in more than $150 million of savings to them. The new PBS listings, such as contraceptives and menopause medications, are giving women more affordable options at different stages of their lives, and our cheaper medicines are delivering affordability. The first PBS listing for new contraceptive pills in more than 30 years, and two more forms of contraceptives, have helped more than 400,000 women save more than $55 million on 1.27 million scripts, which previously could have cost up to $380 a year. The first PBS listing of new menopausal hormone therapies in more than 20 years has helped 520,000 women save $110 million on three million scripts, which previously could have cost them up to $670 a year.

I know that women in Boothby and across Adelaide have been greatly relieved by the establishment of an endometriosis and pelvic pain clinic in my electorate of Boothby. Since it started a couple of years ago, Thrive Endo Clinic has been providing multidisciplinary clinical services to women who in many instances have been suffering for years. They provide education to patients and practitioners alike. They've also developed individualised endometriosis plans, similar to an asthma plan, so that women can better understand their own symptoms, recognise early signs of an onset, and understand the sorts of measures that work for them to eliminate or minimise the impact. This is one of 33 clinics across Australia that is revolutionising endometriosis care and transforming the experience of women who have this terribly painful and life-changing condition. Add to this the more than 11,000 women who've accessed endometriosis medications at PBS prices, saving $11.7 million on 600,000 scripts, which previously could have cost up to $2,700 a year. These medicines are now available for no more than $25 a script, or $7.70 for concession card holders.

Recently, the endometriosis clinics have also started supporting perimenopause and menopause care. More than 137,000 women have undergone a menopause health assessment since being covered by Medicare. Australian women are also benefiting from new Medicare items for longer consultation times and higher rebates for specialised gynaecological care. Larger Medicare payments and more bulk-billing for IUDs and contraceptive implants continue to save women up to $400 in out-of-pocket costs a year, improving access. This includes three new items for nurse practitioners to deliver these services and training for health practitioners on long-lasting contraceptives, including insertion and removal. This gives women genuine choice over reproductive health care access and affordability.

One experience common to all women, providing they live long enough, is the experience of perimenopause and menopause. Approximately 51 per cent of the population will experience menopause, yet it is ignored, barely taught at medical school and poorly dealt with in the workplace. Menopause is the cessation of menstrual periods and is usually only obvious in retrospect when you realise you haven't had a period for 12 months or more without a medical reason. Perimenopause is the time leading up to your final period and just after. It can start in your 40s or earlier or later. It can last between two and 10 years and has a number of symptoms, depending on the woman. There are the classic hot flushes—or, as we like to call them, power surges—which can also cause night sweats, brain fog, forgetfulness, sleep problems, anxiety or depression, dry or itchy skin, a reduction in sexual desire, joint and muscle pain, and weight gain around the stomach. Our perimenopause and menopause campaign targets women aged 35 to 55 years and aims to destigmatise conversations, help them recognise the symptoms earlier and help them find accurate information, evidence based treatment and support if they need it.

This government is serious about women's health, and we put the money, the services, the MBS and PBS items behind it, because women count.

I rise today to mark Women's Health Week, and I want to start with a story about a young girl who was taken to hospital with severe abdominal pains. She was 14 years old. The doctors treating her believed she had appendicitis. The pain was severe. Surgery was being discussed. Everyone was focused on getting her into theatre as quickly as possible, and rightfully so. Before that happened, an experienced female nurse walked into the room and asked a handful of questions about her menstrual cycle—questions that, as a woman, she knew to ask. They were simple and everyday questions in the life of a woman. Thankfully she asked them, because they changed the direction of her treatment. The surgery never happened. The diagnosis was different, and a young girl was spared an unnecessary operation because someone took the time to consider a possibility that had been overlooked. I thought about that story during Women's Health Week. Of course, the doctors were trying to help, and the nurse was trying to help. What the story shows is that understanding women's health can completely change an outcome. It shows how important it is to ask the right questions and how easily women's experiences can be missed when they are not part of the conversation from the beginning.

That is just one reason Women's Health Week remains so important. It gives us an opportunity to talk about issues that affect millions of women but are still often treated as uncomfortable, private or secondary compared with other health discussions—or, even worse, they are unknown or unconsidered. Many women can recall a time when they felt something was wrong but struggled to get answers from a doctor or medical professional. Some spent years seeking a diagnosis for endometriosis. Others go through perimenopause without understanding why their bodies suddenly feel different, from stiff joints to night sweats. I even found myself with symptoms that I didn't know were part of perimenopause until years and years later. Some present with symptoms of heart disease and discover that what they have experienced did not fit the way many people expect those symptoms to appear. Although the circumstances vary, there is a common thread running through many of these stories. Too often, women find themselves having to return for another appointment, explain their symptoms again or push harder to be taken seriously.

As the member for Melbourne, I hear about these experiences regularly from women across my electorate. One conversation that has stayed with me was from a woman seeking a routine prescription for her contraceptive pill. She had taken time out of her day to attend an appointment, she paid for the consultation and expected to leave with her prescription. The need to have continual appointments is one thing when asking for the pill, and it's bad enough, but, instead, the conversation took a very different turn. The doctor questioned her decision and told her he would not prescribe the medication without the involvement of her husband.

Yes, you heard it: the doctor insisted her husband was with her before she received the pill. Unbelievable. Thankfully, she challenged the decision, she stood her ground, and she ultimately received the prescription she had attended the appointment to obtain. But what stayed with her afterwards was not her prescription itself, it was the thought that many other women would have found themselves in the same situation and simply accepted the answer that was given and left without the help they needed. Access to health care should not depend on whether a woman is prepared to argue for it, nor should routine health care become more difficult because someone else's personal views have entered the consultation room.

The examples I have mentioned today are very different, but they both point to a broader issue: women's health has often been treated as something separate from mainstream healthcare policy when, in reality, it touches every stage of a woman's life. It affects young girls navigating adolescence; it affects women choosing contraception, starting families or deciding not to; it affects women living with chronic pain; and it affects women balancing work, caring responsibilities and the physical changes that come with ageing. When those experiences are overlooked, the consequences can be significant. When they are recognised and understood, health care becomes more responsive and more effective.

That is why I am proud of the work the Albanese Labor government has undertaken in this area. The government's women's health package represents a record investment of almost $800 million in women's health. More than one million women have already benefited from cheaper medicines through these reforms, saving over $150 million on prescriptions for contraceptives, menopause treatments and endometriosis medications. For decades, women were told that additions to the PBS in these areas could wait. Under Labor, new contraceptive pills have been added to the PBS for the first time in more than 30 years, while new menopause hormone therapies have been listed for the first time in more than 20 years.

The government has also opened 33 endometriosis and pelvic pain clinics around Australia. Those clinics have already supported more than 10,000 women and girls and delivered over 28,000 services, helping women access specialist care closer to home and reducing some of the delays that have frustrated patients for years. More than 137,000 women have now accessed a Medicare funded menopause health assessment, and reforms to Medicare have made it cheaper and easier to access long-acting contraceptives, such as IUDs and implants. Those changes are expected to assist around 300,000 women each year.

These reforms do not appear out of thin air. They reflect years of women sharing their experiences and a government that was prepared to recognise there were gaps in the system. They also reflect the simple reality that better healthcare policy starts with understanding how people experience the healthcare system in practice. There's still more work ahead. There are women waiting too long for diagnoses, there are women putting off appointments because of cost, and there are women dealing with symptoms in silence because they are unsure whether what they are experiencing is normal or because they are worried they will not be taken seriously. That is why conversations during Women's Health Week are so valuable. The more openly we talk about menstruation health, endometriosis, menopause, contraception and cardiovascular disease, the more likely it is that people recognise symptoms earlier and seek support sooner. Those conversations also help break down the stigma that has surrounded many of these issues for far too long.

I come back to the story of the 14-year-old girl in hospital. The outcome changed because someone paused, asked a different set of questions and considered an aspect of her health that had not been fully explored. That is a lesson that reaches far beyond a single hospital room. Women's Health Week encourages us to pay attention to experiences that have often been overlooked, to listen carefully when women describe what they are going through and to keep building a healthcare system that responds to these experiences. I'm proud to be part of a government taking real action on women's health, and I will always be a voice for women and girls in this place.

Last week was Women's Health Week. Its theme was 'Do it anyway'. It was an encouragement to women to take steps to look after their own health, even when life gets in the way. That's a good theme. But, too often, when women do take that step—when they go to the doctor, describe their symptoms and ask for help—the system fails. Women in this country are diagnosed later, treated less and believed less than men at almost every stage of life. That is the product of a health system and a medical culture built around the male body, which still, in 2026, regard women as a variant. I know, as a doctor who has worked in the public health system in Australia for three decades, that the bias I'm describing isn't malicious; it's structural. It's in what we were taught, what we weren't taught, which bodies the research was done on and the norms established, and whose pain we were trained to take seriously.

In 2024, nearly 3,000 Australian women and health professionals responded to the National Women's Health Advisory Council's #EndGenderBias survey. Two-thirds had experienced gender bias or discrimination in health care. They described being dismissed, disbelieved and labelled 'hysterical' or 'a drama queen'. They described being sent home when they needed surgery, with paracetamol and a hot water bottle. That survey is not an outlier. A separate national survey of 2,000 Australians in 2024 found that 55 per cent of women felt their pain had been ignored or dismissed. Nearly half of them said that women aren't taken seriously because they're seen as being too 'emotional'.

Let's consider what that dismissal costs. Endometriosis affects about one in seven women in Australia. The average time from first symptoms to diagnosis is about seven years: seven years of being told that your period pain is normal, that it's in your head and that you should try a heat pack. The Institute of Health and Welfare estimates that endometriosis costs this country more than $7 billion every year, most of it in lost quality of life and lost productivity. We're talking about teenage girls who are missing school and women in their 20s and 30s losing jobs because no-one asked the right questions.

Heart disease is where the bias is most lethal. About 20 Australian women die from coronary heart disease every day—nearly three times the number who die from breast cancer. In 2024, more than 2,300 Australian women died from a heart attack. Last October, Professor Clara Chow and her colleagues published in the Medical Journal of Australia the largest Australian study of its kind. They looked at nearly 30,000 people in New South Wales who'd had their first major heart attack over the preceding decade. Women were as much as 16 per cent less likely than men to get an angiogram or a stent within the recommended window. They were much more likely to be dead a year later. The researchers concluded that, at the current rate of improvement, the health gap won't close for at least another decade, and that as many as one in five heart-attack deaths in women could be prevented if they just received the same care as men.

Why does that happen? Because women's heart attacks don't look like the Hollywood heart attack: a man clutching his chest. Women more often present with atypical symptoms: nausea, jaw pain, breathlessness or fatigue. But those symptoms get read as anxiety, as stress or as menopause, so a woman having a heart attack is much more likely to be sent home.

Which does bring me to menopause—every woman who lives long enough will go through it. About a quarter of Australian women aged between 45 and 64 say that it makes their daily life difficult. But the Senate inquiry that reported in 2024 heard from the Australasian Menopause Society that medical students receive as little as one hour—one hour!—of menopause education across their whole degree.

Women told the inquiry that their doctors didn't recognise perimenopause until they started to have hot flushes, a clue that's too late. Many were treated for anxiety or depression for years before their doctors joined the dots. Part of the reason for that is a piece of science which went badly wrong. In 2002, a long-term follow-up study in the states, the Women's Health Initiative, suggested that combined hormone therapy increased health risks like breast cancer and heart disease. It was reported in a way that terrified a generation of women. Prescribing collapsed. It's taken more than 20 years for that evidence to be properly reread and for the profession to accept that, for women under 60, the benefits of hormone replacement therapy clearly outweigh the risks. That's 20 years in which millions of women went unnecessarily untreated. It's only in the last 18 months that things have really started to shift in this country.

In March 2025, new hormone therapies were listed on the PBS for the first time in more than 20 years. There's now a Medicare item for a menopause health assessment. These changes are welcome, and we thank the government for them. I supported them, but they are a beginning, not an end. The workplace-related recommendations of that Senate inquiry for flexible work, proper data, reproductive health leave have thus far been largely left on the shelf.

What happens after menopause matters just as much and gets even less attention. When oestrogen falls, a woman's risk of heart disease rises sharply. Our bones weaken. Osteoporosis affects about one in four women over 50, compared with one in 10 men. Two in five women over 50 will suffer a fracture from a minor fall. Nearly three-quarters of hospital admissions with a hip fracture in this country are women. We know how to prevent that but we don't because we treat bone health in older women as an inevitability rather than a medical condition. Only about half of the older women with high blood pressure in this country have it controlled. Women with high cholesterol are prescribed statins at lower rates than men.

And then dementia—now the leading cause of death in Australia. It's been the leading cause of death for women since 2016. Nearly two-thirds of the 17,500 Australians who died of dementia in Australia in 2024 were women. Older women are also more likely to be living alone on lower superannuation or to be providing unpaid care for someone else, while their own early symptoms of dementia go unreported.

So how did we get here? Partly it's the science. For most of the 20th century, women were routinely excluded from clinical trials. In the United States, women of childbearing age were formally shut out of early stage drug trials until 1993. Drug doses, normal values, diagnostic thresholds, the typical symptoms in the textbooks, are mostly established in men and retrofitted to women. A 2025 analysis in the Medical Journal of Australia found that most Australian clinical guidelines still don't properly account for sex and gender differences.

Partly it is culture. Medicine inherited the idea of the hysterical woman, and it's never fully shaken it. We expect women to have pain. We attribute their symptoms to emotion. Menopause is often just a punchline. When a 50-year-old woman says she can't think straight, she can't sleep and her heart is racing, our system's first instinct is still to reassure her, not to investigate her. But partly it's money as well. Our Medicare system rewards short consultations. A woman with complex, overlapping symptoms, those which are most likely to be missed, needs a long appointment with a good GP, but our funding model discourages exactly that.

None of this is inevitable. We can teach menopause and we can teach women's cardiac presentations properly in every medical school. We can require that publicly funded research collects and reports data by sex. We can fund longer consultation. We can implement the Senate inquiry's recommendations rather than just filing them. And we can stop treating half of our population as a special interest group. Women's Health Week asks women to 'do it anyway'—clue: they will—but this parliament's job is to make sure that, when they do, the system does its part

I'm very pleased to rise to speak about Women's Health Week 2026, which has the theme of 'Do it anyway'. I am going to start with men's health. I recently facilitated a men's health forum in my electorate of Sturt. We had over 100 RSVPs. We listened to panellists from Fat Farmers, the Burnside men's shed, Breakthrough Mental Health Research Foundation, Good Better Best Men and The Men's Table. We had a really lively, honest and productive discussion, with questions being asked by those clearly in the over-80 age group but also by young students from Pembroke School, Saint Ignatius' College and St Peter's College. The message to the men of Sturt was that there are physical and mental health support services out there, they're only a phone call or an email away, and there are dedicated and empathetic men in our community who routinely do what they can to support other men, young and old.

One of the panellists was Professor Gary Wittert, who's the Mortlock Professor of Medicine at the University of Adelaide and a senior consultant endocrinologist at the Royal Adelaide Hospital. Professor Wittert's remarks were of great interest to me, as they differed from a lot of the narratives that were here, and at the same time he highlighted the critical importance of investment in women's health.

Professor Wittert's insights, for me, validated the record spending this government is making on women's health. His observation was that, despite the narrative that men don't go to the doctor, don't take care of their physical health and almost completely ignore their mental health, that's wrong. He said that actually, in his experience, men do go to the doctor as much as women and they do make and keep appointments to help them with their mental health.

Professor Wittert also observed, however, that these observations were right and that men and women do go to the doctor in roughly similar numbers when you take out the number of times women go to the doctor for their reproductive health—or, as it has historically and quite insultingly been referred to, when they go to the doctor for women's issues. So, when you ignore the reproductive health needs of women, you get similar attendance numbers—and we have ignored the reproductive health needs of women for a long time, until this government stood up and said, 'Actually, women do have unique reproductive health needs, because they are designed to have babies and nurture those babies.' Having little babies is complicated. Sometimes it doesn't happen as planned. It's hard. It takes time, and you need support from a dedicated and accessible IVF program, or maybe you need support from an endo and pelvic pain clinic. Then sometimes you actually don't want to get pregnant and have a baby, so you need access to affordable contraceptives. Then, when the phase of life when you ask, 'Should I get pregnant or not get pregnant?' draws to a close, you enter perimenopause and then menopause, and you might need a health assessment or other supports then. Men have health challenges, but they don't have these same complex challenges. They just don't. Women and girls do.

That is why this investment is so fundamental to the health of our nation. Having healthy women and girls means having happy families and happy communities. Having healthy women and girls means economic participation for longer. It means more growth and higher productivity. Having healthy women and girls means having healthy and happy babies, which is good for the future of this country.

This record investment has also meant a loss of stigma surrounding women's reproductive health, and we are now talking about it. Thanks to the work of my great friend South Australian senator Marielle Smith, we now talk about perimenopause and menopause. These naturally occurring events in a woman's life are no longer hidden and no longer seen as sickness or an issue. They are just seen, and, because they are seen, they are supported. Thanks to Senator Smith, we will soon be talking about the postpartum challenges experienced by women. This is courtesy of another inquiry she is leading. Postpartum challenges are complex, scary, unfair and frequent, and they need to be seen, to be understood and then to be supported. This government is listening.

It's not a matter of investing in women's health to the exclusion of men's health or saying that women's health is more important than men's health; it is about acknowledging the biological and scientific reality. Women have children and become mothers, and their health needs, as a consequence, are unique. They are complex, and they require investment because this investment means a healthy community, which is good for men and women. We talk about men's health and women's health, but, when we do, what we are really talking about is human health, because we know that we don't have economic prosperity, improved productivity, qualified workers or entrepreneurs without a healthy population. A healthy population underpins a healthy economy, and this government has invested and will always invest in our world-leading healthcare system to promote human health.

'Do it anyway' is about women's health, and it's also about human health. When Mum makes time for that vaccination, she's protecting herself so she stays healthy for her family. When Nanna has that scan, she's saying: 'I'm worth it. I want to be around for the twilight years of my life, and I want those years to be quality so I can have a meaningful relationship with my grandchildren.' When your aunt has that test, she's taking control of her concerns. She's asking to be heard, and she's seeking the care and reassurance she deserves. When your female parliamentarian colleagues or your female colleagues or your female leaders take a sick day because they're actually sick, they get better quicker and return to being productive members of the workforce, which is good for everyone.

This government is going to continue to do it anyway. Twelve months after the landmark $792.9 million women's health package, the Albanese Labor government is continuing to deliver on its promise of more choice, lower costs and better care for Australian women and girls. Since this announcement, more than one million women have accessed cheaper scripts for new contraceptives. Menopausal hormone therapies and endometriosis treatments were also listed on the PBS.

I couldn't believe that last year represented the first PBS listing in more than 30 years for new contraceptive pills and two more forms of long-acting reversible contraceptives and the first PBS listing in more than 20 years of new menopausal hormone therapies. Just think about what you were doing 20 or 30 years ago. Twenty years ago, I had just finished university and was starting my career as a lawyer, and 30 years ago I was in year 9. That's how long it has been.

We say there has been a generation since the turn of the century, but that also means it had been a generation since these critical medications and treatments had been updated and made accessible for women. Now women with endometriosis are accessing treatment at PBS prices, saving millions of dollars. Women undergoing IVF are receiving earlier and more affordable access to a form of fertility treatment, and, since January 2026, women have been getting further savings from the reduction of out-of-pocket costs for PBS prescription medicines. They are now 25 bucks, with a concessional co-payment remaining at $7.70 and frozen until the end of the decade.

So let's do it anyway. When people say, 'What about the men?' let's continue to invest in women's health. Let's do it anyway. When people say, 'It's just women's issues,' let's do it anyway. And when people say, 'Well, that's actually just how it is; women have babies, and they just need to deal with it,' let's do it anyway. This government will continue to invest in women's health because investment in women's health is an investment in a healthy community. This government will continue to do it anyway, and to the women and girls out there, you should too.