Private Health Insurance (National Joint Replacement Register Levy) Amendment Bill 2026

Dr HAINES (Indi) (18:07): I second the member for Kooyong's amendment, and I'd like to make a few brief remarks. We are so lucky to have someone of the calibre of the member for Kooyong in our House to make an amendment such as this with the expertise that she brings to this subject matter. Her career as a medical researcher, as a paediatric neurologist and, indeed, as someone, as she's told us, who established her own register is incredibly important, and it's really pleasing to see the minister in the House listening intently to what she had to say, because she brings such expertise to this subject area.

As the member for Kooyong points out, Australian healthcare data is currently fragmented over more than 140 separate clinical registries. MBS and PBS data is a largely untapped goldmine of longitudinal population-wide health records, and I'm acutely aware of the power of data. It's what transforms our individual experiences into a workable evidence base to support better treatments, safer clinical decisions and more effective policy-making.

In my early years as a researcher, I spent a lot of time in Sweden, and Sweden, of course, is part of the broader Nordic goldmine, indeed a treasure chest, of linked clinical data. Together, they form a cluster of registry based medical research based on population ID. The amount of epidemiological information that I was able to tap into as a researcher in Sweden was incredible, and it's something that I simply couldn't do as a researcher in Australia.

There is so much to learn from bringing together our medical evidence so that we can collectively have the power to produce results that can truly change people's lives, and the member for Kooyong has outlined that in such a powerful way. At a time when the economy is crying out for productivity gains, I say this: here is such a brilliant productivity gain. I urge the government to unlock the potential of our clinical data.

I commend the member for Kooyong's amendment to the House.