Health Legislation Amendment (Miscellaneous Measures No. 1) Bill 2025

Ms JORDAN-BAIRD (Gorton) (16:24): I rise to speak in support of the Health Legislation Amendment (Miscellaneous Measures No. 1) Bill 2025, brought forward by the Minister for Health and Ageing, and I commend him for doing so. Health care is fundamental to the wellbeing of Australians, and Medicare is at the heart of our healthcare system. In 1984 the Hawke Labor government introduced Medicare, and in 2025 strengthening Medicare was the beating heart of our election campaign, because that's what good governments do: they invest in and protect our public healthcare system.

I couldn't be prouder to stand in this chamber as part of the Albanese Labor government, legislating to protect and improve our healthcare system. The amendments in this bill clean up technical issues, making things fairer and easier for our healthcare workers and supporting the growth of the health industry in Australia. The independently led Kruk review of health practitioner regulatory settings highlighted shortages in Australia's healthcare workforce, and these workforce shortages are significant.

In the June quarter of 2023, 44 per cent of health professional vacancies were unfilled. An extra 13,000 medical practitioners, 40,000 nurses and 27,000 allied health professionals are likely to be needed by 2026. These workforce shortages exist in all Australian states and territories, and they are widespread across medicine, nursing, midwifery, and allied health professions, including dentistry, OT, physiotherapy, psychology and radiation therapy.

Workforce shortages mean increased workloads for health practitioners, and, importantly, they mean Aussies having reduced access to care and poorer patient outcomes. Around 40 per cent of Australians wait at least 24 hours to see a GP for urgent care. Some six per cent of people wait longer than 365 days for elective surgery, with some waiting more than 500 days.

When we don't have a strong and supported healthcare workforce, Aussies pay the price. I've seen this firsthand in my electorate of Gorton, in Melbourne's west, one of the fastest-growing electorates in the country. There are over 47,000 families across the electorate, and new ones are created every day, with 10 babies a day born in the city of Melton alone.

In so many ways, my electorate represents Australia as a whole, with its vitality, its rich cultural and linguistic make-up and its aspirations for the future. An electorate like mine—young, diverse and aspirational—has many needs that have yet to be met. One area that struggles to keep up is access to health services.

Gorton residents experience significant disadvantage in accessing health services. In the city of Brimbank, a staggering 28 per cent of residents aged 18 and older have been diagnosed with two or more chronic diseases, conditions that need to be managed throughout their lives. I recently met with some residents at Wintringham in Delahey, in my electorate.

This service provides quality care and accommodation to elderly men and women who are financially disadvantaged, homeless or at risk of homelessness. Wintringham residents are a fantastic group of people who have an op shop open every fortnight on a Tuesday. But many are burdened with a number of chronic diseases, which means they are constantly in and out of hospital, trying to navigate appointments, scans, specialists and outpatient care.

I want to see better health outcomes for people in my community in Gorton like those Wintringham residents. This bill, along with the suite of healthcare reforms introduced by the Albanese Labor government, is so important for my community in Melbourne's west and for all Australians. The proposed amendments in this bill will take significant steps towards modernising Medicare and simplifying bulk-billing and insurance rebates.

Most importantly, they will break down barriers to accessing health care and to training and qualifying doctors. We built Medicare, and today we're here to strengthen Medicare. The automation of Medicare provider numbers is just one of the measures we're taking to update and protect Medicare.

This is about reducing unnecessary barriers to healthcare professionals practising and to bringing on more skilled health practitioners in Australia. Currently, Medicare provider numbers are allocated by the Chief Executive Medicare as one of their functions under the Human Services (Medicare) Act 1973. At the moment, the Chief Executive Medicare is unable to approve the use of computer programs to make appropriate non-discretionary decisions to allocate Medicare provider numbers.

This bill will change that. This bill will streamline the application process for health practitioners, enabling them to receive a Medicare provider number quicker and provide healthcare services sooner. This is a technical change, but it's an important one.

It takes between 10 and 15 years for a local GP to be fully trained. Internationally qualified health practitioners take 35 to 130 weeks to be ready to practise in Australia, nurses and midwives take up to 91 weeks and OTs take up to 135 weeks. When we need GPs in our hospitals and our clinics, we don't need qualified and trained GPs to be prevented from practising because of unnecessary wait times on Medicare provider numbers.

The same goes for all healthcare professionals. We're doing everything we can to have more healthcare providers in our workforce and more health services in our health system, and that's what this bill is all about. Schedule 2 to the bill, the amendments to chapters 2, 5 and 6 of the Private Health Insurance Act 2007, is about supporting the affordability of private health insurance and access to private healthcare services.

The private health insurance rebate is an initiative designed to make private health insurance more affordable for Australians by funding part of their premiums. As a result of systems limitations, some elements of the registration and claims-processing system were being administered inconsistently with the requirements of the act, and these amendments will break down these unnecessary barriers.

Again, we're talking about reducing barriers to more Australians accessing better care. Schedule 3 to the bill allows regulations to be made to modernise assignments of the Medicare benefits process, the process that underpins Medicare bulk-billing. Last year, the Albanese Labor government passed legislation to modernise and simplify how patients assign their Medicare benefits.

These changes recognise that patients and healthcare providers are no longer using paper based processes that existed when Medicare was first set up over 40 years ago. The amendments in this bill will build on these important changes, remedying legal and technical issues. This means that Labor's 2025 election commitment of providing $7.9 billion in bulk-billing incentives will not be adversely impacted by non-compliant business software.

Modernising Medicare is just another step in our plan to protect and strengthen the vital healthcare system that Australians rely so heavily upon. The final part of this bill, the amendment to the Health Insurance Act 1973, is about ensuring consistency for healthcare workers and protecting good faith in program activities. At the moment, former Medical Rural Bonded Scholarship Scheme participants who voluntarily opt in to the statutory program and who fail to complete their return-of-service obligation within the allowed 18-year period or withdraw from the program earlier face a six-year Medicare ban.

Subjecting these doctors to a Medicare ban jeopardises continued service provision and access to care for Australians living in regional, rural and remote communities and in other areas of workforce shortages. We have a workforce shortage in Australia. My best friend, Dr Melanie Johnston, is a medical doctor working across multiple Melbourne hospitals.

She has worked very hard to get where she is, and she is saving lives every single day. She often tells me about the extraordinary hours, hospital staff shortages and lack of specialists across the system, which lead to burn-out for so many. A six-year Medicare ban for bond doctors does not properly address the workforce shortage issue.

In fact, it's reductive. A six-year Medicare ban is not in the interests of the individual bonded doctor, nor is it in the interests of the Australian community. Removing this ban will also ensure consistency for all bonded doctors when it comes to the consequences of breaching return-of-service obligations.

The proposed amendment will also extend the existing grace period from the HECS census date, meaning a student can withdraw from the bonded medical program without consequence at any time until they are awarded their medical degree. Removing the requirement for students who withdraw to repay the cost of their Commonwealth supported place under the program is a better fit, and it's recognising that the decision to withdraw is a difficult one, often reached because of challenging personal circumstances.

The amendments aim to ensure the consequences of breaching a condition and/or withdrawal from the program fairly balance both the personal circumstances of the bonded participant and the broader interests of the community. It also allows for work completed by the bonded participant in good faith consistent with program objectives to be counted towards their return-of-service obligation.

These legislative amendments build on a suite of other reforms Labor has introduced to strengthen Medicare and our healthcare workforce. We took health care to the election, and, across the board, we're legislating change. We're growing the health workforce to deliver more doctors and nurses than ever before, including the largest GP training program in Australian history and hundreds of scholarships for nurses and midwives to extend their skills and qualifications.

This includes incentives like the Commonwealth prac payment, which means students on their mandatory nursing and midwifery placements will be paid for their work. We are making the single largest investment in Medicare ever. That's delivering an additional 18 million bulk-billed GP visits every year so more Australians can see a bulk-billed GP.

We're tripling the bulk-billing incentive for people who need to see their GP most often, helping pensioners, concession card holders and families with children. We have made it cheaper and easier to see a doctor, having restored bulk-billing for 11 million Australians and having created an additional six million bulk-billed GP visits. We've delivered the biggest-ever reduction in the cost of PBS prescriptions and frozen the cost of PBS medicines at just $25, the lowest it's been since 2004.

We've made hundreds of medicines cheaper for Australians. We have been putting in the work to improve access to health care by expanding the availability of free Medicare urgent care across the country. I was lucky enough to open the 90th urgent care clinic in Melbourne's west with the Prime Minister and my friend the member for Fraser last month.

But we are not stopping there. We've already opened 90 urgent care clinics right across the country and we've committed to another 50. We're investing landmark commitments in women's health.

For too long, women's health issues have not been adequately addressed. We are working to reverse decades of neglect to women's health, with $570.3 million to deliver more choice, lower costs and better health care for women. We have opened 22 endometriosis and pelvic pain clinics and are opening another 11.

Initiatives like these will see Australian women and their families saving thousands of dollars on health related costs across their lifetime. We're also backing men's health because for too long men's health and mental health in Australia have been overlooked. We have established and are expanding a network of Medicare mental health centres, helping Australians to have better access to mental health services.

We're delivering $11.3 million for Movember to provide men's healthcare training to primary healthcare workers and to develop a campaign to encourage more men to visit the doctor. That's in addition to $20.7 million invested into grassroots initiatives that support men's mental health and wellbeing in community settings. This bill is cleaning up largely technical issues, because clearing up details like this is really important.

We're supporting simplified and streamlined billing for privately insured hospital systems so they do not have to deal with bills from multiple providers. We're clarifying wording to ensure that any eligible person covered under a private health insurance policy can assign their own Medicare benefits on behalf of the person in whose name the policy is held. The details are the difference between hospital staff spending unnecessary time on paperwork billing multiple providers and hospital staff spending time dedicated to their patients thanks to a streamlined billing system.

It's the difference between bureaucratic delays and a patient having access to a doctor and receiving that treatment sooner. It's the difference between an outdated and inadequate healthcare system and one that better serves our diverse and wonderful Australian community—to support people like the Wintringham residents in Delahey, in my electorate, to support the doctors and healthcare workers like my best friend, Melanie, and to support families in my electorate and those right across the country.

These amendments matter, and I commend the bill to the House.