PRIVATE MEMBERS' BUSINESS

Mr SOON (Banks) (11:24): It is a pleasure to join colleagues on this side of the house in supporting the member for Solomon's motion. He is someone who has worked incredibly hard to secure two urgent care clinics at Darwin and Palmerston in his electorate, and it's a testament to how hard he works for his constituents. No-one knows when they're going to get sick or pick up an injury, and it's never guaranteed that a GP will be open when you need to see them.

For too long this meant Australians had to choose between going to the emergency department or going without care. Fully bulk-billed Medicare urgent care clinics have filled the missing middle in our healthcare system and, as the data shows, they are taking the pressure off our hospital emergency departments, with after-hours care for urgent-but-not-life-threatening conditions.

When Labor was first elected, we promised to open 50 clinics. Instead, in our first term, we delivered 87 clinics nationwide. Last year we promised 50 more clinics, and now every single one is open, bringing us to 137 clinics nationwide.

And these clinics aren't going anywhere, with last month's budget securing the funding to make these clinics a permanent part of our healthcare system. The results speak for themselves. As of 8 June this year, there have been more than 3.2 million urgent care clinic presentations, and every single one of them was fully bulk-billed.

In my community we are served by both Carlton and Bankstown urgent care clinics nearby, which both open nearly two years ago to this day. At Carlton they have seen more than 28,000 patients since that day and, at Bankstown, nearly 14,000. These are thousands of people who would have ended up waiting in an emergency room at either the Saint George or the Bankstown-Lidcombe hospitals or, even worse, gone without care at all.

This is a tangible difference being made by a government who believes that the health of its people is worth investing in. Everyone on this side of the House loves our urgent care clinics and knows the difference they are making in our communities, but there are some members in this place who aren't fans. Indeed, the Liberal Party opposed them when they were first announced by the health minister, and on various occasions they labelled them a disaster or a failure.

In fact, the Leader of the Opposition went so far as to call them wasteful spending that would be axed if they had won government last year. Then thank goodness Australia avoided that. The coalition might wish that people would believe their about-face on urgent care clinics, but Australians haven't forgotten that or their disastrous record on Medicare.

It is a record that this government has had to work incredibly hard to reverse. It has taken record investment, as the member for Soloman's motion notes, but we are making real progress and seeing real change. We have tripled the bulk-billing incentive for those who need it most and saw a turnaround in bulk-billing rates, and the investment we promised last year, to expand the incentive to every Australian, is working as intended.

Bulk-billing rates are climbing in every single state and territory, and in my electorate of Banks 88.6 per cent of GP visits are now fully bulk-billed, a big jump compared to 2023 and nearing the 90 per cent mark that our investment was designed to achieve. We now have 22 fully bulk-billed GP clinics and dozens of pharmacies dispensing PBS medications for $25 a script as part of the cheaper medicines program that has saved my constituents more than $12 million cumulatively.

It couldn't be much clearer. This government sees Australians' health care as an objective to invest in with things like urgent care clinics, bulk-billing and cheaper medicines. Those opposites see health care as a line item to cut and a problem, unfortunately, to ignore.