Varun Ghosh (WA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

On this issue of Medicare, last week the coalition wanted to go right and this week they're missing the forest for the trees. They're playing word games and politics with public health care in this country, and the outcome of the election reflects that the Australian people trust this government and the Labor Party in their commitment to Medicare and they don't trust those opposite. They don't trust those opposite because those opposite speak out of both sides of their mouths on this.

It is in the DNA of the great Australian Labor Party that public health in this country should be free and should be delivered for everyone through bulk-billing. The reason it is in our DNA is that we are committed to fairness, and that's what's flows from a public health system that is well funded and where people don't have to pay to go to the doctor. You only need to look at the United States to see the contrast when a health system is not free and, in fact, is prohibitively expensive, because in the United States medical bills are the highest cause of personal bankruptcy. Some studies say that up to two-thirds of personal bankruptcies occur because someone gets sick and they cannot afford the treatment and the drugs.

That's why this government has made the biggest commitment to Medicare in dollar terms in 40 years, because it's a government that recognises that this provides core help to working Australians not only in terms of relieving cost-of-living pressures but also in terms of their actual physical health. What we saw leading into the election and what we see, unfortunately, is that Australians either delay or do not get treatment that they need because it costs too much money, and that costs the country at a broader level too, because it means they don't go in for primary healthcare check-ups and preventive check-ups, and it then costs money when people get sick and the cost of treating them down the road is higher.

That fundamental commitment is reflected in the policies of the government: a commitment to more bulk billing, a commitment to cheaper medicines and keeping the price of medicines in this country down, and a commitment reflected in the creation of 87 Medicare urgent care clinics where you can go with your Medicare card. This is the biggest investment we've seen in a very long time. It's $8.5 billion. It saves the patients money out of their pockets and it helps our country more generally.

The modelling which was discussed during the federal election was that nine out of 10 GP visits will be bulk-billed by 2030, and what was the basis of that? On what basis could we say that? It was that we tripled the bulk billing-incentive in November 2023, and since then we've seen a massive turnaround in bulk billing rates. I probably shouldn't say 'massive'; we've seen a significant turnaround in bulk-billing rates. We've seen a national increase of 3.2 percentage points. Across the different states, we've seen that bulk-billing rates have increased by 2.5 percentage points in New South Wales, 2.8 percentage points in Victoria, 3.4 percentage points in Queensland, 5.2 percentage points in South Australia, 3.3 percentage points in Western Australia, 8.9 percentage points in Tasmania, seven percentage points in the Northern Territory and 4.1 percentage points in the ACT. Increasing the incentive increases the availability of bulk-billing, and this is a huge commitment the government has made.

Senator Sharma also repeated something that coalition senators often say in this place, which is that the rates of bulk-billing under the coalition were higher. What that ignores—and this is where the detail of this is quite important—is that, as a matter of substance, those bulk-billing rates were artificially inflated. That's why the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners described bulk-billing as in freefall when the coalition was in government. They inflate their figures by relying on the massive numbers of simple COVID related operations that were given under bulk-billing, like PCR swab tests and vaccines. That's not a true reflection of what bulk-billing was doing in the country.

The Vice-President of the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners called them out at the time, saying that their 88 per cent was a misleading figure and significantly skewed. What we know is that we're investing in Medicare and increasing the bulk-billing incentive, and that will lead to more free GP visits in Australia. That's why Australians have trusted the Labor Party with Medicare, and that's why what's said opposite ought not be believed.