QUESTIONS WITHOUT NOTICE

Mr BUTLER (Hindmarsh—Minister for Disability and the National Disability Insurance Scheme, Minister for Health and Ageing and Deputy Leader of the House) (14:41): Thank you to the member for Barton for her question. Through her work at the St Vincent de Paul in New South Wales before she came to this place, every day she saw the sorts of choices that families under cost-of-living pressure have to make.

That explains the strength of her conviction and advocacy for our determination as the government to deliver more free visits to the doctor and even cheaper medicines. I saw this a few weeks ago when she and I visited the Carlton Urgent Care Clinic in the Barton electorate, just around the corner from the St George Hospital. Since it opened last year, it has already seen about 18,000 patients completely free of charge—patients like Gabrielle, who said in a Google review: I've been here twice for my 92 year old Mum.

Each time the service has been caring, thorough, and informative. Wait times were very good, as were the nurse and doctor. I'm impressed and grateful.

Especially on weekends when your GP is closed, or you don't quite need to go to emergency but need urgent attention. Well worth it! Melissa said similar things about Nurse Kass and Dr Meera, who helped with her two-year-old daughter, who had split her head open.

Again, they didn't have to go to hospital. This Carlton Urgent Care Clinic is just one of 90 that we've already delivered. They're open seven days a week and are fully bulk-billed.

All you need to take is your Medicare card. Already they've seen very close to two million patients. We want more Australians to get that sort of care, the sort of care Gabrielle and Melissa talked about receiving from Carlton.

That's why we promised 50 more urgent care clinics at the last election. Three are already open, and 47 have already been subject to competitive tender processes and will be announced very soon. I promised that they'd be open by the middle of next year, but I want to overdeliver on that.

I'm hopeful that as many as possible will be up and running by Christmas this year. Once they are all up and running, four out of five Australians will live within a 20-minute drive of a Medicare urgent care clinic. Together, they will see two million patients every single year, every one of whom will be bulk-billed.

Importantly, they won't just be getting high-quality urgent care when and where they need it, fully bulk-billed, fully free of charge, as important as that is. They'll also be taking pressure off busy emergency departments, like the one at St George Hospital, and that's what the member for Barton and all her colleagues on this side are focused on: delivering for their community and delivering on promises they made to their electorate at the last election, not the mindless division and infighting that seems to occupy those opposite every waking hour.