Larissa Waters (Queensland, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Women's Health Week is Australia's largest national health campaign, dedicated to the health and wellbeing of women, girls and gender-diverse people. Medical misogyny means that women's health is often neglected. And, for many of us juggling work, family and care, finding the time to prioritise our health concerns frequently falls to the bottom of the to-do list.

Once we find time, we must jump through hoops for proper diagnoses and treatments for things like menopause, endometriosis and migraines or to have our pain taken seriously. We must travel hundreds of kilometres to access abortion services or even, in some cases, to give birth. The most common person experiencing chronic pain is a woman in the peak of her working years. This gendered aspect of pain and pain management exacerbates the gender pay gap through lost work and it places an enormous financial burden on women.

The Greens took a plan to the last election to make women's health care more affordable, accessible and inclusive, including 12 days of paid gender-inclusive reproductive health leave each year, free contraceptives and period products, free public abortion care, increased Medicare rebates for IVF and for them to be accessible to all LGBTQIA+ people and a doubling of the number of allied health visits for women's chronic pain management from five to 10.

Women's health needs to be taken seriously at every stage of women's lives. Last year's Senate inquiry into perimenopause and menopause delivered a consensus report with strong recommendations around workplace policy, improvements to education and access to treatments. If the government would like to give women something to truly celebrate this Women's Health Week, adopting those recommendations would be a good start—and so would reproductive healthcare leave, while you're at it.