Mark Butler
Hindmarsh · Australian Labor Party · Australia
“But earlier today we were all in here voting on the latest instalment in the member for Lindsay's ongoing but thus far unsuccessful campaign to rebrand the Liberal Party.”
“I thank the member for Werriwa for her contribution and for her really strong support for everything we're doing to make Medicare stronger and make medicines cheaper. I thank all members for their contributions to the debate on this bill. As the member for Werriwa said, Medicare is the very best of Australia.”
“I thank the member for his question, which is a question I've answered before in this place since the budget. As I've said on a number of occasions publicly and in this chamber, the additional support that over-65s have received since about 2004 for their private health insurance premium is something we did revisit given the significant p…”
“But, under ours, they'll receive an increase of more than 20 per cent, or an additional $160 million in this year alone, which means more doctors, more nurses and better care in Tasmania.”
“Importantly, this bill provides stability so patients can continue to benefit from the outcomes of these programs and strengthened access to primary care.”
“That approach gives providers and the government greater certainty while preserving the flexibility needed to keep program settings up to date as health system needs evolve. Importantly, the bill does not change the underlying policy settings of existing programs.”
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“Currently, private health insurers are required to apply to the minister if they wish to change the premium for an existing product. This has typically occurred once a year through the annual premium round process. Insurers are not required to seek approval for the premium charged for new products. Some insurers have used this process to circumvent the intent of the premium round by closing an existing product to new members and launching a new but very similar product at a higher price than was authorised by the minister for the existing product. This process, known as phoenixing, hurts not just new entrants to private health insurance who are directly impacted, but the 15.3 million people who hold private health insurance who are left unprotected from underscrutinised changes.”
“Schedule 1 will amend the Health Insurance Act 1973 and the Private Health Insurance Act 2007to: Importantly, the amendments will continue to protect the privacy of consumers, and no patient information will be published. The Department of Health, Disability and Ageing is establishing an internal review process for medical practitioners to inquire or to request the department to review the fee information that is published about them. Without passage of this schedule, Australians will continue to have uncertainty about the potential costs of their treatment. Patients will continue to be unable to compare between providers and unable to seek better value from their private health care. Schedule 2 of the bill relates to changes to strengthen ministerial oversight of private health insurance premiums to better protect consumers.”
“To support greater transparency, since 2022, specialists and insurers have had the opportunity to participate in the Medical Costs Finder and publish their fees and out-of-pockets data. Uptake has been shockingly low with only one to two per cent of specialists and 10 per cent of insurers participating on the website as at December 2025. Schedule 1 will allow for the publication of the relevant data on the Medical Costs Finder without the need for input from specialists as it will be drawn from Medicare, hospital and insurer billing data already collected by government. While the focus is on the charging practices of non-GP specialists, general practitioners and their billing could also be published on the website in the future.”
“An increasing number of Australians are not taking up referrals from their general practitioner to see a specialist due to cost. In 2024-25, 8.6 per cent of people delayed or missed specialist care—that's over 800,000 people—because of cost. The most common cause of out-of-pocket costs is medical specialist fees. It is unjustifiable to require patients to commit to a medical treatment without knowing what the cost of that treatment will be and without being able to compare those costs against the fees charged by other providers. Understanding the level of support that is provided by their private health insurer is also vital in determining their likely out-of-pocket costs.”
“I move: That this bill be now read a second time. The Health Legislation Amendment (Improving Choice and Transparency for Private Health Consumers) Bill 2026 will enable Australians to make informed decisions about their health care and private health insurance. It provides clarity on individual medical practitioner fees and out-of-pocket costs. It safeguards consumers by outlawing product phoenixing, closing a loophole that allowed private health insurers to close a product and re-open an identical one at a higher price or reduce the value of a product without ministerial scrutiny. Schedule 1 of the bill focuses on providing consumers with more detailed information on the expected medical fees charged, and likely out-of-pocket costs, for their private health care experience.”
“Thanks to the member for Barton. She told me that her time at St Vincent de Paul before she came to this place reinforced, for her, the importance of health care being more accessible and more affordable for all Australians. That's why we have a Strengthening Medicare agenda that rests on four core pillars. Rolling out 137 urgent care clinics—”
“In recognition of her remarkable journey and her contributions, Katherine was named Australian of the Year for 2026, the third South Australian in just seven years to win that prestigious award. As her local MP, I'm so proud to recognise Katherine Bennell-Pegg as a constituent who embodies determination and excellence. Her achievements show that Australians from our local communities can reach national recognition and even reach for the stars.”
“She served as assistant manager of the chief technology office before becoming Director of Space Technology. In 2023, she began astronaut training at the European Space Agency in Germany and in April 2024 became the first person to qualify as an astronaut under the Australian flag. Katherine has been directly involved in NASA's Artemis program, which will return humans to the moon for the first time in more than 50 years. Katherine and her husband, Campbell, worked on the Orion spacecraft, the vehicle central to these missions. Australians are watching with pride and anticipation as she prepares to go further into space than any Australian before her.”
“Her service was recognised with the Sword of Honour and the Field Marshal Sir Thomas Blamey Memorial Award for topping her officer class at the Royal Military College. In 2007, Katherine completed her degrees and was awarded the prestigious Erasmus Mundus Scholarship. This opportunity took her across Europe as part of the Joint European Master in Space Science and Technology program. By 2010, she had completed two master's degrees, in space science and space engineering. From 2014 to 2019, Katherine lived and worked in Europe, building an impressive career at Airbus. During this time, she married her husband, Campbell Pegg, and together they welcomed two daughters. In 2019, Katherine and her family returned to Australia to join the newly established Australian Space Agency in Adelaide.”
“Today I rise to acknowledge and to celebrate an extraordinary resident of Adelaide's western suburbs: Katherine Bennell-Pegg, whose achievements continue to inspire Australians right across the country. Katherine was born in Sydney in 1984 and, from a very young age, she had an ambitious dream: to become an astronaut. While many childhood dreams fade, Katherine's only grew stronger. With the encouragement of her parents, she committed herself to learning, excelling at school and pursuing interests including aerobatic flying and amateur astronomy. Katherine went on to the University of Sydney, completing honours in aeronautical and space engineering and a Bachelor of Advanced Science in physics. She also served in the Army Reserve, showing strong leadership and discipline well beyond her years then.”
“I thank the member for Macquarie for her question and also her relentless advocacy for an urgent care clinic in her community. I'm delighted, because she told me the Hawkesbury urgent care clinic opened last week—the 123rd clinic—and it is already operating very, very well.”
“For too long, Australian women were getting short-changed by our healthcare system—not enough attention to keeping the PBS updated, not enough support during phases like menopause and perimenopause, and too often, frankly, being expected simply to suck it up with conditions like endometriosis and pelvic pain. Well, this package has already gone a long way to righting those wrongs and making sure that Australia's women reap the benefits from a stronger Medicare.”
“More than 660,000 women have filled two million scripts for new medicines we listed on the PBS, saving them tens and tens of millions of dollars, after decades of inaction. Every primary health network now has a dedicated endometriosis and pelvic pain clinic either open or due to open over the next several weeks. More than 70,000 women have used the new Medicare menopause assessment just since July, and thousands and thousands of women have used bulk-billed visits to access long-acting contraceptives like IUDs or implants without having to pay the hundreds and hundreds of dollars they had to pay for that service before 1 November.”
“The truth is women spent decades in this country simply not getting the support that they needed and that they deserved—no new contraceptive listed on the PBS for more than 30 years, no new menopause treatment listed on the PBS for more than 20 years and no new endometriosis medicine for more than 30 years, not because they didn't exist but forcing Australian women to pay top dollar for the best medicine on the market. Well, this government changed that with a landmark women's health package that we announced one year ago today, and I want to pay credit to the Assistant Minister for Social Services, who crafted that package, and to the Assistant Minister for Health and Ageing, who has spent the last several months implementing it, because this package has made a real difference to Australian women.”
“Thank you to my friend the member for Dickson for the question but also for joining us in the Mural Hall this morning with the Minister for Women, the Assistant Minister for Health and Ageing and so many others of our colleagues. She is one of a record 69 women who sit in the government party room, and every single one of them regularly reminds me that you can't be serious about strengthening Medicare without being serious about strengthening women's health, because, of course, women consume about 60 per cent of all health services, often not because they're sick but because they're women taking responsibility for their own and their families' reproductive health and planning or because they're going through menopause or perimenopause.”
“It now provides access to high-quality medical advice 24/7 at the end of your phone, as well as, if appropriate, a direct consultation by a GP on telehealth after hours, all free of charge, obviously. Since we launched 1800MEDICARE on 1 January last month, 120,000 Australians have used that helpline and 5,000 of them have been referred to that GP consult after hours. That is 120,000 in just one month, all helping to deliver the stronger Medicare that the member for Bendigo has been fighting so hard for.”
“As the Prime Minister has said, last week he struck an historic agreement with premiers and chief ministers to provide record support to our public hospitals, 750 of them, including the Bendigo hospital, tripling the additional support that hardworking hospitals would receive compared to the agreement that they had struck under Scott Morrison. But that's on top of all of these investments to strengthen Medicare, to deliver high-quality, affordable care to people in their own community, to take pressure off hospitals like the one at Bendigo by rebuilding general practice, by driving up bulk-billing, by rolling out Urgent Care Clinics. But there is more. As the member says, 1800MEDICARE was an election commitment we made last year.”
“The Bendigo Urgent Care Clinic that the member talks about has also seen almost 20,000 members of her community since it opened in late 2024, all free of charge, and about half of them indicate that, if the clinic wasn't available, they would have gone to the local hospital, the Bendigo hospital emergency department. As a result, semi-urgent and non-urgent presentations to the Bendigo emergency department, what they call category 4 and category five 5 presentations, are down almost 10 per cent at that hospital, freeing up the ED staff to focus on the lifetime emergencies that they were trained for and that hospitals were built for.”
“Thank you to the member for Bendigo for her question and for being such a Medicare champion. The hard work that she has done promoting our Strengthening Medicare agenda in her community means that the people of Bendigo have enjoyed some of the best results in the country. After we tripled the bulk-billing incentives for pensioners, concession card holders and children back in 2023, bulk-billing in Bendigo went up by 10 per cent, the third-best result of any electorate in this country, and our latest investments are proving just as successful in her community. Before November, fewer than one in five general practices in Bendigo bulk-billed all of their patients all of the time. Today that figure is three in five, more than tripled in just three months.”
“State and territory governments have made the decision that they will amend their legislation. The bill before the House now determines whether or not a patient who has a prescription made by an eligible nurse is able to access the PBS, and the member for Mackellar well understands that. This really is an affordability question before the House and then after it the other place, so we will not be supporting the member for Mackellar's amendments in this place. Her comments obviously come from a very good place and from a very rich background as a medical practitioner. We will listen to the submissions that are made by the AMA, the college and other groups that are participating in the Senate committee inquiry. But, as presently advised, we'll be opposing the amendments. Bill agreed to.”
“The other comments, though, that the member for Mackellar makes about the submissions that the college and the AMA have made to the Senate committee, we will take into consideration if this bill passes the House and then moves to the other place after the committee has reported. I want to emphasise again that both doctors' groups were heavily involved in that consultation. Indeed, both of them have pointed to that consultation as being a very high standard compared to another consultation that is under way right now that they're not as happy about. But I also want to say the prescribing rights of this population of registered nurses, who will have to have done additional training and receive the endorsement of the board, is proceeding. Whether or not this bill passes the parliament, that is proceeding. The board has made that decision.”
“'Prescriber shopping', which was the term the member for Mackellar used, has become much more of a challenge in a telehealth environment. Some tragic cases, one in particular, led to the government making that announcement last week to ensure all prescribers—because that was a question of the number of doctors prescribing—have access to and actually use the records. As I said in response to the member for Mallee's amendments, we've made the announcement. There will now be a process of consultation to design the national medicines record, and we will obviously take account of any change to the prescribing population as we go forward.”
“I thank the member for Mackellar for those remarks and also her engagement on this bill and other bills—particularly in the health portfolio, given her background. She raises some issues that are being ventilated in the Senate committee inquiry in relation to this bill, which is still underway; the committee hasn't yet reported. I reiterate what I said in response to the member for Mallee's amendments—that this change, that's been endorsed by the board and will be the subject of enabling legislation at state and territory level, has been the subject of nine years of work, with patient safety right at the core of that work. I'm glad to hear the member for Mackellar's comments around the national medicines record that I announced last week.”
“Importantly, this will also enable registered nurses, subject to the endorsement of the board, to play a prescribing role, in the appropriate way, in other settings such as: aged-care settings; hospital settings, including for discharge; mental health settings; and others. For those reasons, we will not be supporting the amendment.”
“I also indicate—and I think I said it in my summing up—that this has been the subject of almost a decade of consultation and modelling by the nurses' board. All the doctors' groups were involved in this as well as, obviously, a range of other groups. The member said that there was no funding available for this. As the member well knows—I know she's very familiar with primary care—the workforce incentive payment already supports the employment of registered nurses in primary care settings. This will simply ensure that they're able to do some more work subject, obviously, to the oversight of medical practitioners working in those practices.”
“As I indicated, we won't be supporting this amendment. The effect of the amendment would really be to ensure that this particular group of registered nurses, who are now able to seek this endorsement through changes made by the board and will now be able to prescribe as state and territory parliaments change their legislation, which they have all committed to, will not be able to access the PBS. It would effectively make medicines more expensive for patients who had those medicines prescribed under changes that have already been decided on by the board and that are in the process of being made by state and territory parliaments. This legislation will simply ensure that those patients are able to pay PBS prices, not the market prices that the National Party would have them pay under their amendment.”
“That's why, only in the past week, I announced steps to deliver a national medicines record, ensuring that patients and their care teams can have accurate and up-to-date medicines information. A consultation process on the design of that medicines record will commence very soon, and, obviously, we'll take account of the change to nurse prescribing under the PBS, if this bill passes. I thank all members for their contributions to the debate on this important bill. Question agreed to. Bill read a second time.”
“Designated registered nurse prescribers must maintain an active prescribing agreement with an authorised health practitioner, like a medical practitioner or a nurse practitioner, ensuring appropriate oversight and collaboration in care delivery. This legislation supports the government's commitment to enabling Australia's health workforce to operate at full scope of practice. It delivers better access to cheaper medicines under the PBS. I thank the member for Mackellar and the member for Mallee for their proposed amendments to the bill. The government will not be supporting these amendments. The bill has already undergone extensive consultation, as I said, going back to 2017. I also thank the member for Mackellar for her contribution, particularly on maintaining patient safety, which this government is committed to.”
“As with other prescribers, the list of medicines that will be able to be prescribed under the PBS by a designated registered nurse prescriber will now be considered, if this bill passes, by the independent Pharmaceutical Benefits Advisory Committee. This reform aligns with the objectives of the National Medicines Policy, promoting equitable, affordable and timely access to high-quality medicines and related services. It also supports the government's commitment to deliver cheaper medicines to the Australian community. The bill also amends the Health Insurance Act 1973 to ensure that nurse prescribing under the PBS is also subject to the Professional Services Review Scheme. This peer review mechanism safeguards the integrity of the PBS and other Commonwealth programs.”
“The NMBA, the board, developed these standards for designated registered nurse prescribers through multiple rounds of public consultation, which received strong and broad support. All health ministers endorsed the scheduled medicines standard, which came into effect in September 2025, with the first cohort of nurses expected to complete their education and receive endorsement by July this year. By enabling designated registered nurse prescribing under the PBS, the bill supports safe, timely and affordable access to medicines. Registered nurses can already prescribe. This bill enables them to prescribe under the PBS, improving affordability for consumers. It enables registered nurses to better meet community health needs and strengthens the health system by addressing workforce shortages and building long-term capacity and sustainability.”
“I thank the member for Werriwa and all of the other members for their contributions to this important piece of legislation. The Health Legislation Amendment (Prescribing of Pharmaceutical Benefits) Bill amends the National Health Act 1953 to authorise designated registered nurses as prescribers under the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme, or PBS. These nurses will be able to prescribe specific medicines that qualify for Commonwealth subsidy under the PBS. This bill advances scope-of-practice reforms identified by the Unleashing the Potential of our Health Workforce review, as well as the Strengthening Medicare Taskforce. Since 2017, the Nursing and Midwifery Board of Australia and chief nursing and midwifery officers have conducted extensive research and consultation on nurse prescribing models.”
“It was fun to spend time with you on so many occasions with your family and your friends down at Henley Beach. May you rest in peace.”
“I know how proud Nick would have been about the way in which—it's very confronting, I imagine—the community has taken notice of Nick's passing. It's a high-profile passing, and it was a very big funeral at the church, a very big state memorial service. Talking about your dad, who was such a high-profile figure, can't be easy while you're grieving yourself, and they did it with such dignity, warmth and pride of what their father did for their family and did for their community. I couldn't have more respect for all of them than what I have for the way in which they've handled this period of real grief. To Nick I say thank you for the advice and the mentoring that you gave to me. It's meant an enormous amount to me. Thank you for the hospitality you showed us over many years. It was not just instructive; it was fun.”
“I know she found it difficult, but it was reflective, it was wise, it had an extraordinary amount of analysis, and it was just so loving of her father. Aria, who I know much better and is, as I said, the candidate for the state seat that I live in—I would love to see her be my local member—was typically strong and forthright and, as her dad would have insisted, used the opportunity to advocate for better policy in aged care and stroke care in particular. Mary said, with tongue in cheek, that the fact that all three are now lawyers showed a real failure of parenthood, and maybe to a degree she was right. They really are apples that didn't fall far from the tree. There's a lot of Nick in all three of them and a lot of their mum as well.”
“He rang the bell a lot, agitated a lot for better conditions, as you'd expect. I think we all missed the contributions that Nick otherwise would have made over those last six or seven years. Thank you for the indulgence to say a few words about someone who had such a big impact on my life. In conclusion, I want to say how much the South Australian community, the Greek Australian community in Adelaide and the Labor family have tried to wrap their arms around Nick's family: Nick's wife Mary; his older son Nick, who has built an extraordinary legal career himself—and I know how proud Nick was of the younger Nick—and his two younger daughters, who are now in their 20s, Mikayla and Aria. I've talked about Aria. Mikayla, who I think is only 23, gave an extraordinary address to the memorial service.”
“He continued to support the party. He continued to mentor young people. He built an extraordinary career in business. It's not always that people make that transition from being a successful minister to being a successful businessman. Nick undoubtedly did. He had a lot more to contribute and a lot more to give when he was very cruelly struck with an illness 6½ years ago. I was due to have lunch with him and Mel Mansell, the editor-at-large of the Advertiser , and Nick, unusually, was late. After making a call, he had been taken to the Royal Adelaide Hospital and never really recovered. He spent time at Hampstead and then some years at Westminster, a nursing home just near his house and around the corner from my house as well, and was cared for wonderfully, according to his family, by the staff who were there.”
“Clyde was such an important part of the modernisation of our party but really the leader of our branch for three decades or more. He recognised what Nick could bring to the parliament and to our party and the need for us to start making real connections to communities like the Greek Australian community. Nick passed that on. He learned that from Clyde and from Mick and from Reg Bishop and others. He passed it on to Jim Toohey and he passed it on to the next generation, and I for one am so enormously grateful. These things are sometimes tense. The master-apprentice relationship is not always easy and is sometimes a little tense. And John Rau frankly said that Nick might have wanted to spend more time in the parliament and would have made an enormous contribution. But, after leaving the parliament after 25 years, he made every day count.”
“But it was something that characterised Nick right through his time as a minister, as a shadow minister and then after he left the parliament in the mid-2000s. It reflected the way he'd come up. It really was something for Nick—as I said, a 30-year-old legally qualified Greek Australian—to come into the Australian Senate. It's not so unusual now, which is a terrific thing, but it was. It really was, 45 years ago. That reflected the vision and the support that he got. As I'm sure my friend the member for Makin remembers—he worked in the Whitlam government as a staffer with Nick—it was the support of two giants of the Labor movement, real giants of South Australia, Mick Young, the then member for Port Adelaide, and Clyde Cameron.”
“And I think we're all very grateful to him for that. But, while being a busy cabinet minister and then a busy shadow cabinet minister who paid a really leading role after we lost government in 1996 in this place, he always had the time to mentor younger members of the party. I know what an influence he was on Penny Wong. I've witnessed it. I know what an enormous supporter he was of her potential and the need for us as a party to get her into parliament and to use that potential for, in part, our party's interests but, more importantly, the nation's benefit. And he used to have us round the barbecues. He used to talk to us respectfully—with much more respect than I think sometimes we deserved, as precocious pains in the backside, as I said.”
“It's had four leaders in 35 years, and our current leader, Peter Malinauskas, is likely to be there for a long time to come. It's been electorally very successful and has made real change in a state and a jurisdiction that's not easy. It doesn't have a lot of the natural advantages that other states have, whether it's the resources you see in Western Australia and Queensland or the big population centres of the two big states. And so Nick's contribution—largely in partnership with now Senator Farrell and also with Pat Conlon, a dear friend of Nick's who worked for him for some time and then became a minister in the Rann government—has set up that branch—which had had a patchy history, I think it's fair to say, before the mid-nineties—for real success and a real contribution to the interests of South Australians.”
“The Bolkus Left was one of the insurgent factions at the time in South Australian Labor Party politics and ultimately won the tussle between warring subfactions of the Left, and the Bolkus Left just became the Left. Although that sounds sort of funny and tongue in cheek, it was actually a really important thing for the South Australian branch, because what came out of Nick using his networks, his experience and his wisdom to seek change in the Labor Party and re-establish what had been a long consensus culture in the branch of the Labor Party in Adelaide has set the party up—as Peter Malinauskas, the Premier, said at the state memorial service—for three decades of real success. This is the best branch in our party. I think it's the most stable.”
“When people sat down with Nick, he wasn't one of those people whose eyes were darting all around the room to see who they could talk to next. People went away from a conversation with Nick feeling like they had been listened to—actively listened to—and that was really one of the enduring things that I think people take from Nick. It's something I see so deeply in his daughter Aria, particularly, who has worked with me for the last couple of years and is campaigning now for the state parliament as well. When I got to know Nick a little bit better in my early 20s and into my 20s, he had the privilege of having a faction named after him.”
“He was the first Greek Australian to be appointed to cabinet, and that was something he was deeply proud of, because he was so proud of his culture and he was so widely respected in what is a large Greek Australian community in Adelaide, particularly in the western suburbs of Adelaide that Nick called home for many, many decades. I first met Nick in my teens—in my late teens, when Nick was a junior minister, not yet appointed to cabinet—in the late 1980s at a famous, or to some degree infamous, restaurant in Adelaide's Rundle Street called Da Clemente. What struck me then about Nick was his willingness to listen to a young lad who was probably a complete pain in the backside, and that was what people talk about when they reflect on their time with Nick or observing Nick. He was the most active listener, I think, I've ever encountered.”
“At the state memorial service that I had the privilege of being at a little while ago, a Vietnamese Australian woman told the story of Nick and Gareth Evans helping her father, who had been in prison in Vietnam for years and years, be released and come and join the family: the mother and the children, who had then grown up and still live in Australia—just some of those little pearls, the stories that immigration ministers are able to reflect upon as their time in this place concludes. So he made an extraordinary contribution. He had the privilege of serving as a minister in some extraordinary governments, led by two extraordinary prime ministers.”
“But he won at the age of 30, and that was the beginning of an extraordinary parliamentary career, extending a quarter of a century. I know the Minister for Multicultural Affairs and the Minister for Skills and Training, who had that portfolio before Dr Aly, will talk about Nick's extraordinary contribution to multicultural affairs, to the immigration portfolio, which he held, to changing, through some extraordinary stories, the lives of tens of thousands of people. It's well known the story that he had responsibility for implementing the promise that Bob Hawke, as Prime Minister, made to people from China in Australia, at the time of the Tiananmen Square massacre, that they could stay here. Nick implemented that and changed the lives of so many besides that.”
“He was an unsuccessful candidate for state parliament in the mid-1970s in his 20s. He'd worked as a staffer in the Whitlam government before the age of 25, and he was an unsuccessful candidate on what we generally call an unwinnable position on the Senate ticket at the '77 election. But he was allocated a winnable spot by the party in 1980. He was only 30. He was a Greek Australian at a time when it was unusual to obtain pre-selection support, and, most suspiciously in the eyes of the powerbrokers of the South Australian branch of the Labor Party at the time, he had a university degree—a law degree, for that matter—that made him an egghead, and many other names that are not able to be repeated in this chamber because of standing orders and the decorum of the parliament.”
“In the early part of World War I, it was very seriously impacted by the Ottoman Empire and some thousands of Kazis fled their homes and crossed the ocean and built a new life either in Canada or in the US—happily, for many of them. I think there were only 8,000 or so at the time in Australia. Nick's grandfather was one of those who left his island home in about 1915. So his family had been well established in Adelaide for a long period of time, before Nick was born in the city, in the West End of Adelaide. He went to Sturt Street Primary School. After it closed, he was a leading figure in lobbying the then Wran government to reopen the Sturt Street Primary School that is still again going strong. Nick, from a very early age, was drawn to the Labor Party. In his teens, he campaigned for Don Dunstan in the seat of Norwood in the 1960s.”
“He tragically passed away on Christmas Day, at the age of 75, and he lived an enormously rich life—albeit one that, in the last six or seven years, was very seriously hampered by illness, and I'll talk a bit about that. His family didn't follow the path that is typical of Greek Australians who came to Australia mainly in the postwar period and, to a degree, a little bit during the Depression in the 1930s, when we opened up our immigration channels to continental Europe. His family was from the very, very small island of Kastellorizo, which is a very short distance—a Kazi, as the Minister for Multicultural Affairs says. This is a small island, very close to the coast of Turkiye.”
“It's with a lot of sadness but also a great deal of affection and pride that I want to make a contribution on the motion that was moved by the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition's address to it about the passing of Nick Bolkus. Nick was a huge figure in this parliament for a quarter of a century, but he was an even bigger figure in the South Australian community, in the western suburbs that I have the privilege of representing, and particularly in the Labor Party and the left of the Labor Party, which I want to talk about a little bit. He was an enormously important figure to me and to many of my colleagues, like Penny Wong, Jay Weatherill and so many others, and I'll talk about that a little bit. Nick was born in 1950.”
“Today, that practice bulk-bills all of their patients all of the time. Indeed, before 1 November, only about half of the GP practices in Calwell bulk-billed all of their patients. Today, that figure is 90 per cent, which is great for GPs, great for household budgets and great for the health of that community. That is why we work so hard to strengthen Medicare.”