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) (14:56): I thank the member for Robertson, a hardworking emergency doctor on the Central Coast, for his engagement over the course of today with his emergency-medicine colleagues, who are in the chamber today and who have been here delivering their important, valuable report as frontline emergency department doctors.

We're looking forward to going through that report, which we'll take very seriously. The member knows just how important our reforms to strengthen Medicare are, first of all, to delivering better care for Australians in their community and, as his question says, to taking pressure off busy public hospitals. The member is seeing results in his own electorate.

Bulk-billing in his electorate is now up by more than 10 per cent because of our investments—back over 90 per cent for pensioners and concession card holders. For those who don't have the benefit of a concession card, bulk-billing is up by a whopping 17 per cent, meaning that more Coasties can go to the doctor when they feel they need to rather than when they feel they can afford to.

The new urgent care clinic at Erina is also making a very real difference. It opened just last Christmas and it's already seen more than 13,000 patients—all fully bulk-billed—and many of them are kids, like Amy's son. Amy wrote to the member for Robertson recently to give him the benefit of her experience.

She said: 'I want to say a massive thankyou for the urgent care clinic at Erina Fair. Today, my son sliced his finger open doing woodwork at his high school, and I knew he needed stitches but was worried about clogging up the emergency room at Gosford Hospital. The urgent care facility was incredible for us.

We walked straight in and he received seven stitches.' Amy's son is one of almost four million Australians now who have gone through our urgent care clinic network since it opened just three years ago. More than two million people will go through the network now that it's fully operating every single year, taking huge pressure off those busy hospital emergency departments we've heard a lot about over the course of today, delivering high-quality care in people's community.

And, of course, all you'll need is your Medicare card when you go to one of our 137 urgent care clinics. None of this would have happened if there wasn't a Labor government elected last year. The Leader of the Opposition, who described our urgent care investments as 'wasteful spending', had made it very clear that, if they were elected, there would not have been an urgent care clinic at Erina on the Central Coast or in so many other locations across Australia.

But we were elected, and so there is an urgent care clinic there and in another 136 locations around the country.