PMB - Medicare

Government's Commitment to Strengthening Medicare

VIDEO

It is an absolute pleasure to make my first contribution to our new parliament and to make it about Medicare—to move a motion that celebrates that Labor, having been returned to government, will act to strengthen Medicare. We will do that, the same as we did in the last parliament.

When we came to government in 2022, it had never been harder or more expensive to find a doctor. Bulk-billing was in freefall after a decade of cuts and neglects to Medicare. That's why strengthening Medicare was a key focus of our election platform. As a member of parliament who was here during the decade of cuts and neglect, let me tell you how important this is. I was here when the previous government put in the 2014 budget with its GP tax, a co-payment that would have been initiated by law. I was here and worked with members of the public, members of my own community, to march in the streets of Melbourne to push back on that policy, to push back on the then minister for health, the then member for Dickson, Peter Dutton, and his plans. But the opposition were not deterred when the public saw that off. They then built in, by regulation, freezing the indexation for Medicare repayments, which, in effect, led to doctor upon doctor and centre upon centre introducing a co-payment of their own to seek fair payment for the services of our GPs in our areas.

Still, the opposition needs to learn that lesson well—that, if you want to talk about what's pivotal to 27 million Australians, a universal healthcare system is pivotal to the safety and the health of 27 million Australians. It is absolutely pivotal. Being able to see a GP without your credit card and without getting money from the bank, being able to walk in and see a GP, being able to have your preventive health measures provided by a general practitioner in your own community are fundamental to what Australians believe their healthcare system should provide. They are fundamental. Universal health care is fundamental to most Australians and is something they want to see, to ensure it stays part of our health system. There are lots of reasons why but the most important reason is preventive health saves the government dollars in the longer term, in the amount we have to spend on hospitals and the amount we have to spend on chronic conditions. It means Australians, if they've got a preventive-health system in place for them, are walking around healthier. It means early detection of chronic diseases. We've run these arguments a million times, and now, in a second-term government, we get to deliver $8.5 billion for more bulk-billed GP visits each year, hundreds of nursing scholarships and thousands more doctors.

I just want to make the point that, in my community, one of the things the previous government did was rip us off the distribution priority area listings. It had been a fundamental thing in my community, where overseas doctors had come and done out-of-hours care and, in doing so, got themselves their Australian licences. When this was ripped away, when my local GP clinics could no longer do that, not only did our hours offering to see a GP shrink back to business hours—so we lost our longer hours. In a community where people are getting home from work on public transport at six o'clock and leaving in the morning at six o'clock, those long hours are really important. Not only did those hours shrink back; in my community, we lost 30 per cent of our GPs in a 12-month period. We put the DPA back in our last term of government, and those numbers are lifting again. We're really proud to be part of a community where international doctors are receiving their training and getting their qualifications; we're really proud of that in our community. Our community has seen some of those doctors put down deep roots and build new centres. That's what universal health care is about, and those opposite need to acknowledge it.