I acknowledge the work that the member for Riverina has done in rural health—together with his former colleague Mark Coulton, the former member for Parkes, who retired at the end of the last parliament—in trying to improve access to care for people living in rural, regional and remote areas.

I would like to go back to the legislation before us at the moment, the Health Insurance (Pathology) (Fees) (Repeal) Bill 2025. I thank the Minister for Health and Ageing and the Assistant Minister for Health and Aged Care for the work they've done on this legislation, which was presented to the previous parliament but was not able to go through the parliament. It has come up again now and will be passed in the near future. This legislation demonstrates that the government is working at all levels of the healthcare sector to provide fee relief not just to patients but to businesses involved in providing health care. In addition to reducing the administrative burden on the pathology sector, this bill will save costs and improve the efficiency of our pathology sector. This follows on from the findings of the 2022 Health Portfolio Charging Review, which identified that fees set against application categories had not been reviewed or changed since the pathology fees act came into force almost 40 years ago. These fees were arbitrarily set between $500 and $2,500 in 1991.

The consequential amendments included in this bill remove all references to the payment of fees for these application types from 1 July 2025. In line with this intended commencement date, provisions have been included to allow the refund of fees collected between 1 July 2025 and the commencement date of this bill where the applicant's approval has come into force on or after 1 July 2025. To preserve the high level of confidence in the accuracy of pathology testing in Australia provided under Medicare, the administrative requirements, including accreditation obligations, will remain unchanged.

I will talk a little bit about the pathology sector. The work of our pathologists is often behind the scenes. Pathologists are not at the forefront of everyone's daily lives, owing to the unique and important role that they have in health care. They range from anatomical pathologists, performing postmortems on people to try to find out why they may have died, to people analysing bodily fluids, and from bacteriological examination to microscopic examination et cetera of body tissue and cells by histopathologists and haematologists to ascertain what causes diseases and the ways in which to heal them. There are also the bacteriologists, who are able to tell us which particular organisms cause illness and how they should be treated. We also have virologists, who can identify viruses that have caused human illness—most commonly, of course, respiratory viruses. Everyone is now very familiar with the PCR testing that really came to prominence in the pandemic, but it's important to know we were doing PCR testing in children for respiratory viruses for almost 15 years before the pandemic. Pathologists do a lot of work behind the scenes and provide us with the information we need to treat our patients. As a paediatrician, I relied very heavily on our pathology sector to help me in the diagnosis of a whole range of illnesses, from leukaemia through to sickle-cell disease, a number of different haematological problems, the diagnosis of meningitis using bacteriological specimens, and also histopathologists, who tell us what is causing certain pathology in kidneys, liver, the brain et cetera.

So pathologists are really important to us, and it's very important to note that Australia has one of the best pathology systems in the world, provided through the Medicare system to our patients and the hospital system. We rely on them to be well trained, we rely on them to be very accurate and we rely on them to be very timely in the results they give to us as practising physicians. It's very important. In cancer medicine, in paediatrics and in virtually every part of the health system, we rely on our efficient, well-accredited and accurate pathology system to lead us through dealing with the multiple diseases that can affect humans. Really, at no other stage in human existence have we so relied on our pathologists to give us the accurate information we need to manage our patients, and that's particularly true in paediatrics. There is now an exploding field of genetics and genomics where we are using our pathologists to give us the answers to some of the disorders that have plagued human existence since it began. I rely on my pathologists and my geneticists to give me the information I need to talk to my patients. It is very important that we maintain an efficient and highly sensitive system in an accurate way.

This is why accreditation is important. It's important to make regular accreditation something that happens all the time to our pathology providers. Some of them, of course, are in the public system. Most major public hospitals have public pathology providers. They are very highly skilled, particularly in things like cancer medicine. They work long hours. They sometimes work under huge pressure to get accurate diagnoses as quickly as possible. We rely on them also to provide services to our patients in a cost-effective and efficient manner.

We have private providers who are now providing pathology services around the world. I had a small involvement with Sonic Healthcare in the very beginning of their existence, almost 40 years ago. Sonic pathology now provides pathology services in the United States, in Europe, in Asia and particularly in the South Pacific. They are a fantastic company, and I'd like to give them and their CEO, Colin Goldschmidt, a shout-out because I think they've provided a wonderful service around the country over many years.

At no stage in recent memory have pathologists been more front-and-centre than since the pandemic. They really did lift their game and provide diagnostic certainty to Australian physicians dealing with people with COVID and other respiratory illnesses—at levels unprecedented in my lifetime. I thank them very much for their skills and their tireless efforts during that time. This legislation will make their accreditation cheaper for the pathologists, cheaper for the companies, and much more efficient and more streamlined.

In my electorate of Macarthur there are a range of pathology clinics, all of whom are excellent and all of whom provide daily diagnostic tests to my constituents in a very accurate manner. It is really important. I've seen poor pathology results in some places that have led to misdiagnoses of conditions like childhood leukaemia. Unless you have a well-trained pathologist to look at a blood film, it can sometimes be very difficult to identify the leukaemic cells. It can lead to delays in diagnoses and occasionally to death. Inaccurate bacteriological management can lead to misdiagnoses of meningitis, for example, and that can have serious complications. So, even though our pathologists are in the background, I'm very proud of the work they do and I think that it is really important for a world-class health system like Australia to have such wonderful pathology providers. We are very, very lucky. Obviously, we are a big country, and there can sometimes be difficulties in providing these services to rural and remote areas, but for the most part our pathology providers do that, and they do it in a very efficient way. We are very lucky to have them.

This bill is important. The government is looking at the healthcare system across the whole spectrum of healthcare provision, and this is a sign that a government really understands and cares about the health of our people. I recommend this bill to the House.

If I can say just a little bit more in the few minutes that are left to me, we heard some of the complaints about the health system from the opposition. This is my 50th year working in the public hospital system, and it seems to me like a very short period, but I've seen dramatic changes in the healthcare system over that period. I was a medical student when Gough Whitlam first introduced Medibank to Australia, and it was a revolution. It enabled people of limited means to access good-quality health care, sometimes for the first time. I'm very, very proud of that achievement. That achievement was destroyed by Malcolm Fraser in his government, and reintroduced as Medicare by the Hawke government, and we have relied on Medicare since that time. The opposition tried again to destroy it in the Howard government, and then Peter Dutton, one of the worst health ministers that Australia has ever had, tried to introduce Medicare copayments and to break down the fundamental basis of Medicare—equitable care for all. That was a great shame. Luckily, it didn't last long. The Abbott government, who also didn't value health care, also didn't last long. For the opposition to say they've always protected Medicare is simply untrue, and the track record shows that.

The freezing of the Medicare rebates for almost 10 years by the previous coalition government was a tragedy, and it has led us to a position where we have to play catch-up. We can't fix the health system and every problem overnight, but I'm very proud to be part of a government with the Minister for Health and Ageing, Mark Butler, who understands the importance of national access to health care for everyone in an equitable manner. I'm proud to be part of a government that understands that, and we are repairing the damage that was done by almost 10 years of a coalition government. We're not going to fix it overnight, but we are dealing with it on an incremental basis, and there are many issues to deal with. It's not just about access to GPs—we need to train more of our own doctors, for example. That's expensive, but we need to do it. We are still importing 50 per cent our GP workforce. That's too many. We need to be training more Australian-born people or Australian citizens as doctors. That's really important. We need to look at ways that we can encourage more of our medical trainees to move into rural, regional and even outer metropolitan areas. I think the present modelling, the modified Monash modelling, needs to be tweaked, certainly. And it's true in my electorate of Macarthur; we need to have better access to GPs in my electorate out of south-western Sydney. We need to look at ways that we can use other members of the health workforce—our clinical nurses, our pharmacists, our allied health professionals—to provide access to primary care for people.

I'll say a little bit about our pharmacists. My belief is that the single biggest advance in health care in the last parliament was the 60-day prescribing, which effectively halved the costs for people paying for their medication. It was a huge advance and long, long overdue. But we had to fight the coalition tooth and nail to get that legislation through, and there was a huge marketing campaign by the pharmacists against 60-day prescribing. Absolute no-brainer—virtually every other country in the world had 60- or even 90-day prescribing. This made the system much more efficient. People didn't have to go to the pharmacist every month; they could go every couple of months. It also meant that the costs of the prescriptions were mostly halved for many of our constituents—a great advance.

There is much more to be done, and the reduction in prescription costs to a maximum of $25, which the legislation introduced today, is a huge advance. The Labor government understands the importance of health care across the whole economy and across the whole spectrum of Australia. No matter who you are, you get equitable access to health care in Australia because of the work of Labor governments. There have been some reasonable coalition health ministers—Peter Baume was one—and I must say that I think the work that Greg Hunt did in the pandemic was good. But, overall, Australia can thank Labor governments for the maintenance of a universal healthcare insurance system and equitable access to care, and I'm very proud to be part of a government that does support that. This legislation is a small part of that, but it's a sign of a government that understands the health system.

Question agreed to.

Bill read a second time.

Message from the Governor-General recommending appropriation announced.

Ordered that this bill be reported to the House without amendment.