Anne Urquhart (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate take note of the document.

I won't take a long time, but I want to respond to the government response to the Senate Community Affairs References Committee 2020 inquiry into the current barriers to patient access to medicinal cannabis in Australia. We had a hearing in Melbourne on 29 January 2020. I want to focus on one recommendation in one area of this. I'm hoping that when Senator Siewert is finished she will seek leave to continue her remarks later, because I may want to come back at some other time. We heard evidence about Tasmania's nonparticipation in the scheme that was designed to streamline access to medicinal cannabis in appropriate circumstances. That evidence was from the President of the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners. He stated that the college found it 'odd' that, in Tasmania, GPs were not able to prescribe medicinal cannabis as GPs were in other jurisdictions. In fact, in Tasmania only specialists can prescribe medicinal cannabis. The report was tabled in March 2020.

At that same hearing Adjunct Professor John Skerritt stated that federal health minister Greg Hunt had committed to making access to safe medicinal cannabis medications available via those mechanisms to all Australians, but that Tasmania, unlike other states, had not signed onto the scheme at a COAG meeting of health ministers. Following that hearing, Senator Bilyk, who was also on the inquiry with me, and I wrote to the Tasmanian health minister, Sarah Courtney MP, in relation to our concerns around this issue. That letter was sent on 31 January 2020, a couple of days after we had the hearing in Melbourne. Nothing was received from Minister Courtney—no acknowledgement of receipt of the letter, nothing. On 14 July 2020 I sent a copy of the same letter to Minister Courtney, reminding her of the letter and requesting a response. At that time—I think it was the same day or the day after—I did get at least recognition that they had received the correspondence. But here we are in March 2021, and we still have no solid response to that correspondence.

Now we have the federal government response to the recommendations contained in the inquiry report. There were 20 recommendations in that report. Of those 20 recommendations, eight were noted, six were accepted, one was not accepted and five were accepted in part. The one I want to refer to here today is recommendation 11. That recommendation says:

The committee recommends that the Tasmanian Government immediately join all other jurisdictions in participating in the Therapeutic Goods Administration's single national online application pathway for accessing unregistered medicinal cannabis and reducing state-based requirements for medicinal cannabis approval.

That was the recommendation. The government response noted the recommendation and said:

The Commonwealth has a standing offer for Tasmania to join the online scheme, subject to Tasmania agreeing to process applications within a 48 hour time period. This condition was outlined to all jurisdictions upon the creation of the online portal in 2018. All jurisdictions currently participating in the online scheme agreed to this requirement prior to joining. Participating jurisdictions have been processing applications in a timely fashion, in some cases in a matter of hours.

The decision whether or not to take part in the national scheme is ultimately one for the Tasmanian government to make. The Commonwealth stands ready to work with the Tasmanian Government on joining the online scheme, subject to the condition outlined above.

On 9 March 2021—so just a few days ago—I wrote again to Minister Courtney regarding this and have requested an urgent response to my correspondence, given that it has now been well over 12 months since I initially wrote to her and have had no substantive correspondence. This is not the only piece of correspondence over a number of issues that I have written to Minister Courtney on and have not had the courtesy of a response.

While I've been waiting for the response from Minister Courtney many Tasmanians have been waiting for the relief that medicinal cannabis might bring to them. It seemed like at that time Minister Courtney didn't care about the suffering of Tasmanians. They had to go to a specialist to get a prescription for medicinal cannabis. The cost of that was out of the realms of those individuals, let alone getting a specialist appointment to do it. Well, finally today, guess what? The Premier of Tasmania, in a state of the state address, has announced that GPs in Tasmania will be allowed to prescribe medicinal cannabis.

I now look forward to getting a response from Minister Courtney; maybe she'll get to work and respond to me by writing a letter outlining the details of the scheme, which I understand will commence on 1 July this year. I am pleased that that is now happening in Tasmania, but I am very disappointed that many, many Tasmanians have had to wait for a very long time. I like to think that the numerous letters and prompts that I have sent to Minister Courtney may have had some effect and brought about some action on this matter.