CONSTITUENCY STATEMENTS

Dr HAINES (Indi) (09:48): I've spent more than 30 years working in health care. I've been a nurse and a midwife. I've worked with women through some of the most important and some of the most difficult moments of their lives.

And one thing I've learned is this: women know their own bodies, but, too often, our health system doesn't listen to them. Women's health is not a niche issue. It's not simply about reproductive health care either.

It's about women leading healthy lives and accessing the care they need at every stage of life. Around the world, we're once again seeing women's reproductive health care become a political battleground. This is a reminder that we can never take hard-won progress for granted.

Women deserve the freedom to make decisions about their own bodies, their own health and their own futures. But advancing women's health is about more than protecting rights. It's fundamentally about understanding the specific health needs of women and effectively responding to them.

Earlier this year, the Australian Longitudinal Study on Women's Health celebrated its 30th anniversary. For three decades, it's followed the lives and health of thousands of Australian women, generating evidence that has shaped improvements in policy, legislation and funding. The value of the study is that it doesn't treat women as simply a collection of body parts or diseases.

It explores women's health through a broader social and psychological context. It has helped expose problems that were too often ignored. We know that women with endometriosis wait on average between five and 6½ years for a diagnosis after symptoms first appear.

I want to congratulate the government on the really good work that they're doing in this space. We know women are around 75 per cent more likely than men to experience adverse reactions to prescription medicines. We know the symptoms pre-empting heart attack can present differently for women.

These are not just statistics; they're reminders of what happens when women's health is under-researched and underfunded and when health care is built on an assumption that what works for men works equally for women. It's simply not the case. Insights from the study have also been central to developing an evidence base about the health of women in regional and rural Australia.

While it doesn't take a study to know that access is harder in communities like those I represent, this evidence really helps us move beyond acknowledging the problem and closer to the solutions. If you live in regional Australia, you might have to drive hours to see a specialist, wait months for an appointment or face dangerous delays in an emergency. Good health care, effective women's health care, is not just about having a service somewhere in Australia.

It's about being able to access that care where you need it, where you live, it's better research into women's health; and it's reproductive health care without stigma. It's a health system that recognises that women's health needs, from adolescence through pregnancy and motherhood to menopause and beyond, are incredibly important. Women deserve a health system that works for them.