Health Insurance Amendment (Incentive Payments and Other Measures) Bill 2026
Ms JORDAN-BAIRD (Gorton) (11:27): Our green and gold Medicare card means opportunity. It means receiving high-quality health care, regardless of your bank balance. I'm so proud to be part of the Albanese Labor government, which is committed to strengthening Medicare for generations to come, and this bill, the Health Insurance Amendment (Incentive Payments and Other Measures) Bill 2026, is an important part of exactly that.
Labor has always and will always fight for accessible health care. Medicare is one of the reasons I joined the Australian Labor Party when I was a teenager. We have more than 50,000 families across my electorate of Gorton, and new ones are moving in, building their homes and their futures in Melbourne's western suburbs.
These families are feeling the cost of living when paying their bills at the checkout or at the bowser. With competing cost-of-living pressures, these families shouldn't be worrying about the cost of seeing a doctor as well. These families deserve regular access to affordable GP appointments, and that's why this bill matters.
The bill before us provides a clear legislative framework for our primary care incentive payment programs—programs like the Medicare Bulk Billing Practice Incentive Program, which is increasing access to free GP appointments right across the country. This bill is about strengthening the accessibility of health care for all Australians. It's about making sure that every Australian can access the care they need, no matter where they live.
It's another piece in a huge body of work by this government that is ensuring that quality health care is accessible and affordable for every Australian. Our introduction of Medicare bulk-billing clinics is really making a huge difference in our communities across the country. I'm really proud to report that, in my community, there are now 24 Medicare bulk-billing practices—up from 13 before our bulk-billing changes were introduced.
That means that at 75 per cent of our clinics in Gorton you can see a doctor for free, and this is all thanks to Labor's single largest investment in Medicare ever, which is delivering an additional 18 million bulk-billed GP visits every year so more Australians can see a GP for free. With the Sunshine and Melton urgent care clinics nearby, our community can also access free walk-in urgent care.
The Sunshine and Melton urgent care clinics have together seen over 46,000 visits since opening. This is massive. It means that, in Melbourne's western suburbs, people in our community have access to free walk-in care when they need it.
With this budget, we're making urgent care clinics like the ones in Melton and Sunshine permanent. Urgent care clinics play a really important role in taking the pressure off our emergency departments. In the western suburbs through the Melton urgent care clinic in the member for Hawke's electorate, the Sunshine urgent care clinic in the member for Fraser's electorate and the Werribee urgent care clinic in the member for Lalor's electorate, urgent care clinics are making a real difference in our community in the west.
The Sunshine urgent care clinic has seen over 12,000 presentations since its opening in August last year. Let me tell you about one of those patient experiences. A constituent of mine, Carl from Burnside Heights, recently visited the Sunshine urgent care clinic.
He had an injury at home on a Sunday night at about 9 pm. He was at Sunshine urgent care clinic by 9.15 pm, seen by a clinician, had six stitches put in and was out by 9:40 pm. How good is that?
Carl was able to access walk-in care close to his home in Burnside Heights. That is exactly what we introduced urgent care clinics for: when you need urgent care and you can't possibly wait for a GP appointment, but it's not serious enough for the emergency room. This means that Australians are getting the care they need when they need it without overloading our doctors and emergency systems.
That's not all we're doing to strengthen Medicare and our healthcare workforce here in Australia. We took health care to the election, and right across the board we're legislating change. We've capped the cost of PBS-listed medicines at just $25, the lowest it's been since 2004—when I was in primary school—which has seen a saving of more than $14 million in my electorate of Gorton.
We've doubled the number of medicines now available for 60-day prescriptions, and we've introduced new medicines to the PBS. We've launched the Medicare Mental Health Check In, a free service connecting you with professional mental health support over the phone. For many in our community this is a lifeline.
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, making life easier for our nursing and midwifery students.
We're also 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're investing landmark commitments in women's health, working to reverse decades of neglect to women's health. We've now opened 33 endometriosis and pelvic pain clinics, and more than 380,000 women have accessed new, cheaper contraceptives in the first year of their listing on the pharmaceutical benefits schedule.
Initiatives like these are saving Australian women and their families thousands of dollars on health-related costs across their lifetimes. We're also backing men's health. For too long, mental health in Australia has been overlooked.
We've established and are expanding a network of Medicare mental health centres, helping Australians have better access to mental healthcare services. We're also delivering $11.3 million to provide men's healthcare training to primary healthcare workers and to develop a campaign to encourage men to visit the doctor. That's in addition to $20.7 million in grassroots initiatives that support men's mental health and wellbeing in community settings.
Today we're establishing a clear legislative framework for Commonwealth primary care incentive payment programs, including the Medicare Bulk Billing Practice Incentive Program. Primary care incentive programs encourage GP practices to deliver high quality, continuous and accessible care through incentive payments. The Medicare Bulk Billing Practice Incentive Program established by Labor is probably the most well-known program, but there are also several other programs accessible to practices and doctors that ensure Australians receive the best possible care.
The General Practice in Aged Care Incentive is one such program, which supports older Australians living in residential aged care. It encourages GPs to go out and visit their older patients at their residential aged-care facility, rather than seeing them at their own practice. This makes it easier for older Australians to access ongoing quality health care in a way that's most accessible to them, supporting the health and wellbeing of older Australians and reducing the pressure on our hospitals by ensuring continuous, consistent care.
The longstanding Practice Incentives Program encourages doctors to meet outcomes that plug gaps in the healthcare system and ensure accessible health care for all Australians. These outcomes include offering care after hours, making e-health services available, providing teaching sessions to medical students, servicing rural and regional areas and more. This is complemented by the Workforce Incentive Program, which assists GP practices with the cost of employing a large range of health professionals from various disciplines, as well as encouraging doctors to provide services in regional, rural and remote communities and attracting doctors with additional advanced skills to work outside metropolitan areas, improving access to quality and comprehensive medical, nursing and allied health services in regional, rural and remote areas.
These programs are such an important way for us to realise quality, accessible and affordable health care for all Australians, to make seeing a doctor affordable, to attract doctors to where they're most needed and to make sure that all Australians, not just those who live in metropolitan areas, can access multidisciplinary health care that addresses their specific concerns.
That's why this bill is so incredibly important. Currently, these incentive payment programs operate without a clear and consistent legislative framework behind them. That's a gap because it impacts their effective administration, including strong process around compliance and integrity.
The bill before us plugs this gap, inserting a new part into the Health Insurance Act 1973 which provides a consistent statutory basis for the establishment and administration of these programs. This will improve the effectiveness of these programs in a few ways. It will give healthcare providers and the government more certainty by giving these programs a strong backing.
It will create clear and consistent rules for how these programs are run, including how providers can participate, how often decisions are made and stronger protections to ensure decisions are fair. And it will protect public funding by making sure the right rules are in place for compliance using information and recovering overpayments in incentive payment programs.
This bill also modernises the laws that underpin these programs, allowing some administrative tasks to be carried out automatically while including safeguards to ensure the process is transparent, properly monitored and accountable as well. This will help manage large numbers of applications and decisions more efficiently while still protecting people's rights to have those decisions reviewed.
There will also be very clear review processes as well. Providers can ask for the decision to be reconsidered internally, and, if they are still unhappy with the outcome, they can apply for an independent review by the Administrative Review Tribunal. This bill will do a lot to support the good administration of these programs, but it won't change them.
Providers currently participating in these programs won't need to reapply, and there won't be any changes to substantive eligibility criteria or payment amounts, meaning that these programs can continue delivering good outcomes for Australians. This bill is about protecting Medicare. It's about making sure these programs have the strong legislative foundations they deserve.
It strengthens integrity, it improves transparency, it gives providers greater certainty and it helps ensure public funding is spent where it should be. Most importantly, it helps protect the programs that Australians rely on—programs that make it easier to see a GP, programs that support our health workforce, programs that make health care more affordable and more accessible—because every Australian deserves access to quality health care no matter where they live, no matter how much they earn.
That has always been the Labor way, and it's what this government is delivering—stronger Medicare, better health care and a health system that's there for every Australian. I commend this bill to the House. The DEPUTY SPEAKER ( Mr Buchholz ): I understand the member for Pearce would like to present a copy of her speech for incorporation into Hansard, in accordance with the resolution agreed to on 6 November 2025.