Health Insurance Amendment (Incentive Payments and Other Measures) Bill 2026
Ms BRISKEY (Maribyrnong) (18:29): Australia is in the midst of a green and gold frenzy. The Socceroos are through to the knockouts at the world cup, our women's cricket team is lighting up the T20 world cup over in England, and the Wallabies kick off their Nations Championship campaign against Ireland at Allianz this weekend. The DEPUTY SPEAKER: Hopefully with a win.
Ms BRISKEY: That's right. But there's another bit of green and gold turning up around the country, and it's one I'm especially proud of. More and more medical clinics are putting the Medicare bulk-billing sticker on their door to show that they have switched to fully bulk-billing.
It's a simple thing, but it tells you that, when you walk into that clinic, you'll be looked after, and, when you walk back out, you won't be handed a bill you can't afford. In my community, I dropped into the Essendon Health Medical Centre on Keilor Road just the other week, and there in the window was that green and gold sign. Just down the road from my office, at the Moonee Ponds Super Clinic, I had the privilege of putting that sticker up myself.
Every one of them is a bit of proof that Medicare is getting stronger and fairer and that we're keeping our promise to make life just that bit easier for working people, because in this country the only card you should need to see your GP is your Medicare card. With this bill, the Albanese Labor government is setting out to strengthen that little card even further.
It's worth pausing on what that card actually means to people. Medicare is one of the great expressions of who we are. It's the belief, held quietly but stubbornly right across this country, that being able to see a doctor when you're sick shouldn't come down to what is in your bank account.
That single mum in Avondale Heights or a retired tradie in Essendon or a migrant family in Flemington all have the same right to care, whatever they earn. But we've seen what happens when that promise gets chipped away. When bulk-billing falls, families pay more.
When the gap fee creeps up, so does the worry that comes with it. When seeing a doctor starts costing money people don't have, too many of them put it off until something small and manageable turns into something far more serious. We know this because we've lived through it.
For the best part of a decade, those opposite went after Medicare. The truth is that the coalition has never really made its peace with Medicare. They've only ever retreated when the backlash got too hard.
When Medicare was first introduced, they campaigned to repeal it. Their 'Fightback!' manifesto wanted to scrap bulk-billing altogether, as though our health was just another item on the supermarket shelf. Now we've got a fresh reminder of where they stand, because the Liberal Party has made former prime minister Tony Abbott its president.
If you wanted one person to sum up the coalition's attitude to Medicare, it'd be hard to go past Tony. As health minister and then as Prime Minister, he went at bulk-billing with everything he had. People still remember the 2014 budget—the one that tried to put a $7 fee on every visit to the GP and then froze the Medicare rebate on top of it.
That freeze ran for years, and it pushed more and more doctors out of bulk-billing simply because the rebate was not keeping pace. They have only ever looked at Medicare and seen a bill the country can't afford, while we on this side look at it as something that the country can't do without. But the threat today doesn't come from those opposite only.
One Nation talks a very big game about the forgotten Australia and then votes against them every time it actually counts. When it comes to things that genuinely put money back in people's pockets—the cost-of-living measures that this government has delivered—Senator Hanson and her party have lined up against them. They voted against our tax cuts.
They voted against more affordable early education. They voted against cheaper medicines and the very measures that strengthen the Medicare system that working families rely on—none of which should surprise us. Senator Hanson has hitched herself proudly to Donald Trump and his America-first approach.
When Australians look across the Pacific at the American health system, they see something that genuinely frightens them: a country where getting treated depends on the size of your wallet and where one trip to hospital can bankrupt a family. Here, those same medicines don't cost hundreds of dollars. In fact, because of the actions of this government, no Australian pays more than $25 for a PBS script—the cheapest they've been since 2004.
Senator Hanson votes as though she'd swap our system for the Americans' in a heartbeat. Well, our government is proud to defend the Australian way of doing things and prouder still to strengthen it for our kids. That's what this bill is all about.
It sets up a clear legislative framework for the Commonwealth's primary care incentive payments, including the Medicare Bulk Billing Practice Incentive Program. These are the programs that back the doctors, nurses and practices holding our health system up and that keep good care within reach for people who need it. And they don't sit on their own.
For our government, health has always been a cost-of-living issue; we've treated it as one from day one. I mentioned, earlier, cheaper medicines. The biggest cut to the cost of a PBS script in the history of the scheme has already saved Australians more than $2½ billion since 2022.
Then there are our free Medicare urgent care clinics, which mean a parent could have a sprained wrist or a sick kid seen on the same day, fully bulk-billed, instead of sitting for hours in an emergency department, and, through the recent budget, we're making them permanent. There's also our record investment in public hospitals, under our new national health and hospitals agreement.
Beneath all of this sits the biggest investment into Medicare in its 40 years—our government's record $8.5 billion to deliver more bulk-billing and to train more doctors and nurses. Every one of these measures keeps people healthier and allows working people to keep more of what they earn, and the results have followed. On 1 November last year, we extended the bulk-billing incentive to every Australian and started paying practices an extra loading of 12½ per cent when they bulk-billed all of their patients all of the time.
The latest quarterly figures put the national GP bulk-billing rate at 81.9 per cent for the quarter from January to March, up 4.6 points in a single year, and it's risen in every state and territory, with the biggest jump of all in the Northern Territory—nearly 14 points—and with strong gains in Victoria too. There are now more than 3,800 bulk-billing practices around the country, and more than 1,400 of them used to charge a gap and have since gone fully bulk-billing, which means something like 97 per cent of Australians now live within a 20-minute drive of a fully bulk-billing GP.
In my own electorate of Maribyrnong, bulk-billing has doubled since the last election. That means workers and young people right across my community have more opportunities to see their GP for free. In the end, that's what these reforms come down to.
They're the difference between getting the abdominal pain looked at and putting it off, between filling that cholesterol medication script and skipping it to save money and between following up on that test result and letting the call go to voicemail. The people I talk to in my community are proud to live somewhere that guarantees health care like this. They're genuinely shocked when they see other countries fail at it, and they understand exactly what it means for the people who need it most.
Take cohealth in Kensington. I've spoken about this service here before. Thanks to extra funding from this government, we've secured the continuation of their GP services at that clinic in Kensington and across two other sites, in Fitzroy and Collingwood.
But the reason I raise it here today isn't about the funding; it's about what my community did when the board of cohealth first announced it would be closing its GP services. The reaction was something to see. It wasn't a handful of angry people; it was hundreds of local residents, young and old, who flatly refused to accept that nothing could be done.
From the outside, Kensington can look like a leafy inner-city pocket—and a lot of it is—but it's also home to some of our community's most vulnerable: public housing residents, refugees making a fresh start and Australians from every background you can think of. My community know it. It's why they turned their frustration into action and why they stood with me to fight to keep those GP services open.
As more than a few of them put it to me, this was about more than just a clinic; it was about the community they'd helped build. That is what Medicare really is. It's the community.
It's dignity and it's fairness. That's not the first thing that springs to mind when you picture green and gold. It doesn't run onto the field to a roaring crowd or bring the nation to its feet on a Saturday night, but it belongs on the list all the same, because it belongs to every single one of us.
It's the one card every Australian carries, wherever they come from and whatever they earn. Those opposite have spent 50 years trying to wear it down, and One Nation would trade it for the American model tomorrow, and every time it has been Labor that has stood in the way and defended it. This bill is how we defend it now.
It locks in the programs that are driving bulk-billing back up, and it puts the health of working people out of the reach of those in this place who think it costs too much. The people in my community just ask that, when they are sick, they can see their doctor; that, when the script is written, they can afford to fill it; and that staying well doesn't mean falling behind in rent.
That's the country I believe in. I believe in a country that catches you when you fall and that looks after its people, whether your family has been here for generations or you're a brand new citizen here to build a new life. That's the Australia the generations before us built, and it's the Australia we get to strengthen today.
Labor will always protect Medicare and will always look to strengthen it. We'll keep that little green-and-gold card in the pocket of every Australian for generations to come, because it's more than a card; it's the best of who we are and it's worth every cent. I commend the bill to the House.