GRIEVANCE DEBATE
Ms BRISKEY (Maribyrnong) (13:20): For most of the history of medicine, a woman in pain was treated as a woman exaggerating. She was told it was normal. She was told it was part of being a woman.
She was told to go home and manage it. She was told to just take a panadol and have a lie down. So she did.
She got on with it. She went to work and raised her children and said nothing more about it because saying something had already cost her the last three appointments. The sad part of this is that it's not history.
Women in my electorate are still living in this experience. Women are the backbone of my community. They are the ones who hold down the local sporting club and the neighbourhood house and the family businesses along Keilor Road.
They are also the ones most likely to be looking after someone at home. Fourteen per cent of my constituents, well above the national average, provide unpaid care to someone ageing or unwell. Most of them are women.
A woman who spends her week managing everybody else's health is a woman who often puts her own behind. Endometriosis affects around one in seven Australian women. On average, they wait the better part of a decade for someone to put a name to their pain.
This is a decade of higher than average sick days, and a decade of missed work and appointments that went nowhere. Some women have lost jobs over it. Almost all of them have lost confidence.
A decade does something to a person that the pain alone does not. It teaches her that her own account of her own body is unreliable. That lesson sticks.
She carries it into every waiting room she sits in for the rest of her life. Menopause is the same story, told later. A generation of Australian women were handed no information, no options and no sympathy.
Endure it, they were told. Plenty of them walked away from careers over it and never told anybody why. Now, put that culture inside a health system that spent nine years under attack by those opposite, who were more concerned with making the door harder to walk through.
They froze the Medicare rebate. They tried to charge Australians an extra fee to see their GP. They watched bulk-billing fall away and celebrated it as a saving.
Through all of it, women's health sat exactly where it had always sat: underfunded and underresearched, and treated as a niche concern rather than as the health of half of the population. That neglect is seen clearly in how Australian women went for more than 30 years without a single new contraceptive pill being listed on the PBS. We spent more than 20 years without new menopausal hormone therapy.
For decades, the science continued to move, but governments did not. That was a drought. When you make a doctor more expensive, that cost does not land evenly across the community.
It lands on the people who are already struggling. The women I'm describing had been taught to hesitate for 30 years before anybody in this place ever touched the rebate. That is my grievance.
The damage never showed up in a budget paper. It showed up years later, in a body. A symptom ignored in 2015 becomes a diagnosis in 2026.
A lump left alone becomes a surgery, or worse. A woman who quietly stopped going becomes a woman in an emergency department at two in the morning. Nobody counted that.
There is no line item for the care people went without, but I see it in my community, and every member in this chamber sees it in theirs. This government has started paying down that debt. There are now 33 endometriosis and pelvic pain clinics operating across the country.
A woman can walk into one and be met by people who deal with this every single day and who start from the assumption that she knows her own body. We have made long-acting reversible contraceptives more accessible and menopause treatments cheaper. This year's budget expands access to Keytruda for cervical cancer, and we are doing the work to get universal perinatal mental health screening so that a new mother is asked the question rather than being left to find the courage to raise it herself.
And we have ended the drought that I mentioned earlier. Our government listed new contraceptive pills on the PBS for the first time in 30 years, and new menopausal hormone therapies for the first time in more than 20. In a single year, that has meant over 300,000 women saving $23 million on their contraception and 363,000 women saving $45.4 million on menopause treatments across 1.5 million scripts.
Another 6,700 women with endometriosis have filled their prescription at PBS prices and have saved $4.9 million between them. Since July last year, a woman can have a dedicated menopause health assessment under Medicare, and more than 71,000 have already done so. We have put bigger Medicare payments behind contraceptive implants, which saves up to $400 a year in out-of-pocket costs for women who have been quietly bearing that cost themselves.
And there are now 92 Medicare mental health centres open—free, walk-in, no referral and no appointment needed. For a woman who has spent 15 years being told that her symptoms are merely anxiety, walking through a door and being assessed properly by somebody who takes her seriously is not a small thing. Then there is the money, which, for a lot of families, is the whole ball game.
Since this government came to office, people in my electorate have filled 2.7 million cheaper prescriptions. That's $18.8 million that has stayed in the pockets of people in my community alone—22 scripts for every local resident. That figure is not really about the medicine; it is about how many of my constituents are managing something ongoing—high blood pressure, diabetes, a heart condition, their mental health.
Twenty-two scripts a person is a portrait of a community getting the treatment that they need. Thanks to our government, not one of those scripts costs more than $25, and, if they carry a concession card, it's $7.70. On bulk-billing, 1,420 practices that used to charge have now gone fully bulk-billing since November.
The national rate now sits at 81.4 per cent. In my community, we've seen more than double the number of practices who are bulk-billing every single patient that walks through their door, from Gladstone Park in the north to Flemington in the south. And the urgent care clinic that many of my constituents rely on has now taken 25,742 presentations.
That is roughly 35 people a day who did not spend a night in an emergency department waiting room—free, on a Medicare card, no appointment. Our government knows that there is more work that needs to be done. The cost of seeing a specialist is still high—a gynaecologist a rheumatologist, a psychiatrist.
The bulk-billing reforms have restored Medicare, but a woman who has finally sought a referral should not be stopped at that price. The women I am talking about were never asking for very much. They just wanted someone to listen and to take them seriously.
We can't hand back the years women spent being told to wait or to just take a Panadol. But the woman who books an appointment at Moonee Ponds next Tuesday will walk into a system that is being rebuilt to believe her. Because of our government, she will not have to argue her way in.
Thank you. The DEPUTY SPEAKER ( Ms Lawrence ): There being no further grievances, the debate is adjourned, and the resumption of the debate will be made an order of the day for the next sitting. Sitting suspended from 13:28 to 16:26