Stronger Medicare Awards

Congratulations Dr Lester Mascarenhas

VIDEO

On 4 November, members of this House gathered with GPs and doctors from around the country to celebrate the Stronger Medicare Awards. This was a significant event, and I'm pleased to say that that night Dr Lester Mascarenhas, who runs the Utopia clinic in my electorate, became a Medicare Champion for working in primary care. I was thrilled to be there with Dr Mascarenhas—with Lester— when he was called forward to receive this award because the work that he's done at Utopia is truly inspiring. This is a clinic established—that is now, actually, a charity—to support refugees and asylum seekers who live in my community with their very real health needs. Lester is an inspiration in the health fraternity. He and his partner, Vern, came to Canberra to be acknowledged for that work, and he was surprised to be named a Medicare Champion. The work they do in my community is incredibly important, and it's important, too, to share the way Utopia came to be. It came to be not by imposing ideas upon a community about what was needed but by working with the community outside of the health area and getting to know that community.

The highest number of refugees in my community come from Myanmar of Karen, Karenni, Chin and Kachin background in terms of their ethnicities who have settled in our area, and Utopia has become their go-to place for their health needs, not surprisingly, because they have interpreters on the ground. They have specialist connections into infectious diseases. They really have shaped this clinic to support the community it's designed to support. I want to celebrate Dr Lester Mascarenhas and all who work at Utopia Refugee and Asylum Seeker Health, because they've changed lives—the lives of many who have chosen to call Melbourne's outer west their new home. They spent a year in consultation before they established the clinic, and now the clinic has a unique model of care, supporting the complex and often unmet needs of refugees and asylum seekers in my community. A big congratulations to them.

The reason this government chooses to have the Stronger Medicare Awards is that it is just one more way of ensuring that people understand our commitment to Medicare and our commitment to bulk-billing. Since coming to government, we've had an incredible turnaround from the previous government's policies on bulk-billing, with the incentive tripling from 1 November last year, notably the largest investment in bulk-billing in history. Since then, there have been 5.4 million additional estimated visits across Australia because of this government's investment. That's 103,000 visits to a GP a week. On top of that, we've introduced cheaper medicines. We've introduced a Medicare urgent care clinic. We have one in my community as well in Werribee, which is taking considerable pressure off our public hospital, the Mercy, by seeing patients, particularly the number of children that the urgent care clinic is seeing and particularly in those busy times, busy sports times, after hours, after normal medical hours and particularly on weekends.

More importantly, though, for my community, this government restored Wyndham's distribution priority area status after the Morrison Liberal government cut it. This meant that we lost 40 per cent of GPs in some practices across the city of Wyndham. Those numbers are rebuilding back again since we restored the DPA status. With that and the tripling of the bulk-billing incentive, we're seeing more GPs working longer hours and being open for longer hours in my local community, which means better health outcomes for many people. It also means that practices have an opportunity to do that kind of delivery, that kind of wraparound health services that we're seeing for our refugee and asylum seeker communities at Utopia. It means that the doctors who work in these clinics know that this government has their back, that this government is committed to Medicare and that they're committed to primary health care.