STATEMENTS ON SIGNIFICANT MATTERS
Mrs McINTOSH (Lindsay) (09:12): I rise to respond to the Assistant Minister for Women's statement and to mark Women's Health Week. I do so not just as the shadow minister for women but as one of the millions of Australian women this week is about. I thank my female colleagues for joining me in the chamber.
Women's Health Week asks us to speak honestly about the health of half of our population, about pain too often minimised, symptoms too often dismissed, conditions that have taken far too long to diagnose and women who for generations were simply told: 'It's normal. It's in your head; just push through.' We know better now and, because we know better, we have a responsibility to do better.
On that principle, there should be no division in this parliament. Women's health should never become a political football. Whether a woman can get the care she needs should not depend on who occupies the government benches.
The coalition is proud of the role we played in bringing women's health out of the darkness, out of the shadows. In the 2021-22 budget, the former coalition government invested over $353 million in women's health. That included $22 million for new gynaecology items on the Medicare Benefits Schedule, including assisted reproductive technology and long-acting reversible contraception.
We launched the National Women's Health Strategy. And, in 2022, the coalition funded the creation of Australia's first dedicated endometriosis and pelvic pain clinics. Those investments mattered, and we are proud that governments since, including this one, have built upon them.
Before the last election, the government announced a further $573 million women's health package. The coalition matched that in full because, when something is right for Australian women, the responsible thing to do is not to oppose it simply because the other side announced it; the responsible thing to do is to support it. And there has been progress.
There is now greater Medicare support for menopause and perimenopause assessments, there is cheaper access to contraceptives and new medicines through the PBS, and more women are accessing treatments that for far too long were either unavailable or unaffordable. These are good outcomes—we welcome them. But announcements are not health care, press releases are not appointments, and a promise made here in Canberra means very little to a woman sitting at a kitchen table wondering whether she can afford to see a doctor.
That is the test, not what we announce here in this place but what happens when a woman actually needs help. Can she get an appointment? Can she afford it?
Can she find someone who understands what she is experiencing and can she get that care before her condition becomes worse? Women are very good at putting other people first and themselves last. They care for their children, they care for their parents—and we've been talking a lot about the sandwich generation.
They go to work. They keep households running. They organise everyone else's appointments and quietly postpone their own.
They put off the scan, they put off the specialist and they tell themselves, 'I'll deal with it next week and hope that the pain goes away.' They hope the lump is nothing. They hope the exhaustion is just exhaustion. Sometimes next week is too late.
That is why affordability and access matter just as much as the existence of a Medicare item number. A national bulk-billing statistic is cold comfort to a woman who cannot find an affordable appointment in her own community when she needs one. Women's health policy has to work in the real world, and that means this government must deliver every element of the commitments it made: the training for the health professionals women rely upon, the national clinical guidelines that mean a woman should receive a consistently high standard of care wherever she lives in this country, and proper support for the endometriosis and pelvic pain clinics that so many women now depend on.
Endometriosis affects at least one in nine Australian women, and the average time to diagnosis remains around seven years—seven years. That's a long time, and a lot can happen. Think about what seven years means: seven years of pain; seven years of wondering what's wrong; seven years of missed school, missed work, cancelled plans and interrupted lives; and, for too many women, seven years of being told that what they're feeling is somehow normal.
It's not good enough. For a woman living with endo or navigating menopause—and I'm so pleased we can talk about that a bit more now—or dealing with a reproductive health condition, timely care is not an optional extra. It can determine how a woman works, how she sleeps, whether she can have children and how she participates in her family.
Ultimately, it's about her quality of life. There is another area of women's health where Australia faces an increasingly serious challenge: maternity care. Across Australia, private maternity wards have been closing.
Communities including Darwin, Hobart and the Central Coast have lost private birthing services, and, with every maternity service that disappears, women lose choice, and additional pressure is transferred into the public health system. We sometimes discuss maternity services in the language of systems, beds, workforce, funding, insurance viability. But behind every one of those words is a pregnant woman waiting to start a beautiful journey with her family, a woman preparing for perhaps the most vulnerable day of her life, a woman who wants to know: Where will I have my baby?
Who will care for me? How far do I have to travel? Will someone be there if something goes wrong?
For a woman in labour, distance is not a bureaucratic inconvenience; it really matters to her. For women in regional and remote Australia in particular, access to safe maternity care close to home must be treated with the seriousness it deserves. We cannot simply watch services disappear and call it someone else's problem.
The Commonwealth certainly has a responsibility to be at the table, the states have a responsibility and the private health insurers have a responsibility. Hospitals, obstetricians and the broader health sector need to be part of the solution as well. Mothers do not care which level of government owns the problem.
They just want someone to solve it. The coalition will continue working with obstetricians, midwives, hospitals and communities on practical solutions to protect fertility and maternity care and preserve genuine choice for Australian women. Ultimately, Women's Health Week cannot just be something we recognise once a year in this place.
It has to mean something. It means believing women when they say they are in pain, diagnosing conditions earlier, making treatment affordable, ensuring geography does not determine the quality of a woman's care and protecting maternity services. It means designing a health system around women, rather than asking women to arrange their lives around a health system.
That should be the ambition for everyone in this place—not as a government and an opposition but as a parliament. There will be many things on which those of us on opposite of this chamber disagree. The health of Australian women is not one of them.
Where the government gets it right, we will say so, and, where more needs to be done, we will let you know too. Where Australian women have been promised better, we will make sure those promises are kept. Every Australian woman deserves health care that listens to her, that she can afford, that she can reach and that is there when she needs it, not just during this Women's Health Week but every week of her life.
Press releases are not appointments; sometime next week is too late. Women of Australia just want us here in this place to solve it.