QUESTIONS WITHOUT NOTICE

Mr BUTLER (Hindmarsh—Minister for Disability and the National Disability Insurance Scheme, Minister for Health and Ageing and Deputy Leader of the House) (14:20): Thank you to the member for Swan for that question. As she knows, breast cancer is the most common cancer for Australian women, and, although we have some of the world's highest survival rates for this cancer, even after successfully completing cancer treatment, many women require maintenance care for many years to keep the cancer at bay.

For thousands of Australian women, that treatment has been a monthly injection of Zoladex, a drug that suppresses the hormones that feed the cancer. Some months ago, the company that owns Zoladex announced, very suddenly, it would be withdrawing that drug from the PBS this November, along with some other countries. It is hard to overstate the shock and the deep anxiety that that caused the many thousands of women who, for years, have relied on this drug to keep the cancer at bay and to keep them alive.

Since then, the assistant minister for health and I have been working very closely with the breast cancer community to find a solution for those women. As the Prime Minister said, this morning, he, the assistant minister and I met with the Breast Cancer Network Australia, Cancer Nurses and an incredibly brave patient called Katie. Katie was one of the many women who, immediately after this announcement, started to have some pretty confronting discussions with their clinicians about surgical options to do what Zoladex had been doing for years—namely, keeping them alive.

Katie told her incredibly powerful story as a woman at 34 years of age having her ovaries removed, pushing her into menopause at that early age and preventing her from ever bearing a child. As she told the media so bravely earlier today: Nobody should be making irreversible decisions about their body because they are afraid a medicine might disappear. That work together that we've done with the community led to the government finding an alternative treatment that is equivalent and used widely overseas.

We invited the owner of that drug, Ipsen, to bring it to Australia quickly and go through an expedited PBS process. I want to thank the company for their cooperation on that. Today we were able to announce that triptorelin will be listed on the PBS from 1 October.

It is an equivalent monthly treatment at just $25 a script instead of, as the Prime Minister said, $1,350 every single month. As Katie said, again, in her testimony this morning: Living with cancer will always come with things that we cannot control. But today, women have been given some of that control back.