Jenny McAllister (NSW, Australian Labor Party, Minister for the National Disability Insurance Scheme) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you, Senator Ananda-Rajah. I acknowledge your advocacy for Medicare and for public health in your time in the other place, and doubtless it will continue here. As your question notes, our government has already slashed the cost of medicines. In 2023, we delivered the largest cut to the cost of medicines in the history of the PBS, with the maximum cost of a script falling to $30 from $42.50 previously. But we want to deliver even cheaper medicines, and that's why the government will make sure that a prescription on the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme costs no more than $25. This is a 20 per cent cut in the maximum cost of medicines under the PBS, saving Australians more than $200 million a year. Pensioners and concession card holders will have the cost of their PBS medicines frozen at just $7.70 until 2030.

You'd have to go way back to 2004 for medicines to be this cheap. To remind people, 2004 was when Rove McManus won the Gold Logie. It's the year that Facebook was launched. It's the year Casey Donovan won Australian Idol, and it is the last time that medicines were this cheap. Make no mistake, this is what Labor governments do. This is what real cost-of-living relief looks like. We know that health care should be accessible for everybody—no matter how much you make, no matter where you live—and it's why we will deliver $8.5 billion to expand bulk-billing to every Australian to create a new incentive payment for practices that bulk-bill every patient. This will mean nine out of 10 GP visits will be bulk-billed by 2030. We will also open another 50 Medicare urgent care clinics, and, once all of these clinics are open, four out of five Australians will live within a 20-minute drive of an urgent care clinic.