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

Thank you, Senator Ananda-Rajah, and I commend you for your ongoing in the health care of Australians. This year the Australian people voted for a government that would stand up for them and would stand up for Medicare. And that's what they got. They got it with the Albanese Labor government, and we are making the largest ever investment in the history of Medicare—an 8½ billion-dollar investment—and that started to kick in just a few weeks ago. This will create a new incentive payment for practices that bulk-bill every patient and expand bulk-billing across Australia. It will triple the number of bulk-billing practices and mean that nine out of 10 GP visits will be bulk-billed by 2030. That is what our year of delivering for Australians looks like. We think that approximately 75 per cent of general practices would be financially better off if they moved to fully bulk-billing, and we know that more than a thousand practices have already indicated that they will stop charging a gap fee and move to being a fully bulk-billed service.

The only card that you should need when you go to the doctor should be your Medicare card, and that is what our expansion of bulk-billing is delivering. It's what it is delivering, and it is a rebuild of bulk-billing after a decade of coalition neglect. It is a stark contrast to the record of those opposite. Bulk-billing rates were in freefall under the coalition's six-year freeze of Medicare rebate, which ripped billions out of Medicare. Compare it with our first term, when we delivered $3½ billion in 2023, which restored access to bulk-billing to the 11 million patients that it covered. This year, we are delivering for all Australians with the largest ever investment in Medicare, and it will provide real cost-of-living assistance to families right across the country.