Monique Ryan
Kooyong · Independent · Australia
“I second this motion and commend the member for Curtin's motion to refer the Interactive Gambling Amendment (Gambling Reform) Bill 2026 to the House Standing Committee on Social Policy and Legal Affairs. This should not be a controversial request.”
“What about the clinicians, the researchers, the public health experts and the community organisations who have spent years documenting the devastating impact of gambling addiction? Some of them have been given days to review this complex legislation and provide feedback on it to a very limited extent.”
“After this sort of delay, the government has no excuses for not getting this legislation right. But it's rushing to introduce legislation that has been denied input from the public.”
“They're special relationships, the glue that holds us together. For Emily, Matt and Lucy, Noah and Maia, Millie and Rory—I know you share those special relationships and I know that they'll continue. I know that Rich knew that too. Parkrun is something we all do together. It's really symbolic of Rich.”
“We were fortunate to have people in our lives who gave us a sense of what was possible—doctors, engineers, teachers and scientists. We learnt the importance and the wonder of learning and science. There was always plenty of sport. We participated in everything, but particularly footy.”
“The government has not responded to that recommendation appropriately. Its proposals fall well short of that. There are ongoing and serious questions about the extent to which this legislation will provide any support or any protections for children and for vulnerable Australians.”
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“Some have spent five times as long in immigration detention as they were originally sentenced to serve in prison. Some are frail, some are sick, and some are elderly. They could die in Nauru without proper care. The United Nations Human Rights Committee has previously issued a non-binding order for the federal government to stop one of those deportations on the grounds that the government has legal responsibilities not to deport people to countries where they could face cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment, or death. That is exactly what we propose to do with this legislation.”
“The deal will allow the government to send those members of the NZYQ cohort to Nauru, at a cost of $2.4 million per person in the first five years after that transfer. This payment comes on top of a $100 million treaty signed between the two countries last year, and it is separate from the funding that Australia is already giving to Nauru to run its offshore detention regime. That revelation sets a very stark backdrop to today's debate. What we're talking about is vulnerable people, stateless individuals, refugees and survivors of torture and trauma who will, as a result of this bill, be sent offshore with no public explanation, no proper oversight and no legal recourse. A number of these people previously committed very serious crimes. Some have reoffended. But some have never been convicted of a crime.”
“The bill is presented as a technical fix relevant to a very small number of individuals, but it could in fact potentially be applied to thousands of people—I'm told potentially as many as 80,000 individuals—who are currently seeking residence in this country. Concerns about the bill are shared by legal experts, by refugee advocates and by community organisations across the country—people who see, every day, the human cost of bureaucratic overreach and who deal with the harm and the hurt that it causes. Just today, the Refugee Council has contacted me to describe this bill as 'unbelievably cruel and extraordinarily costly'. The ASRC has called it 'rushed, reckless and dehumanising'. Last week, we learnt that the government has quietly, sneakily signed a $408 million deal, plus $70 million annually, with Nauru.”
“Procedural fairness is vital to public trust in government decision-making and to upholding the rule of law. One of its two core elements, the right to be heard, is specifically negated by this legislation. Under the proposed changes, procedural fairness will not apply to decisions relating to third-country reception arrangements. We claim to live in a strong democracy which respects the individual, but this bill denies individuals who are noncitizens of this country what we regard for ourselves as unalienable rights. A human right is universal; it can't be assumed for some and denied for others purely on the basis of their visa status.”
“They cannot be removed to their home countries, because they face persecution or because those countries have refused to accept them. The amendment now before the House explicitly removes procedural fairness in decisions to remove these noncitizens to a third-country reception arrangement and with respect to the sharing of their personal information with those third countries. The government, in effect, is continuing to double down in pursuing its desire to deport this cohort of individuals by any means possible—by means of legislation which flies in the face of the values and the fundamental tenets of our legal system. Procedural fairness is a foundational principle in Australian administrative law. It ensures that decisions made by public authorities are conducted through fair and unbiased procedures.”
“This bill follows the November 2023 High Court ruling on the NZYQ cohort that it was unlawful for the government to indefinitely detain a person if there was 'no real prospect' of them being removed from Australia 'in the reasonably foreseeable future'. In the recent Federal Court decision, it was held that actions in relation to third-country reception arrangements do not require procedural fairness to be afforded. The proposed amendments seek to codify that recent decision by the Federal Court. This bill is aimed at allowing the government to more quickly deport members of the NZYQ cohort—a group of what we call noncitizens, a somewhat dehumanising term—currently living in the Australian community whose visas were cancelled on character grounds. This cohort previously faced indefinite immigration detention.”
“I rise today to speak in strong opposition to the Home Affairs Legislation Amendment (2025 Measures No. 1) Bill 2025. It is our government's job to ensure national security by controlling who and what enters our country. It must protect our nation, it must enforce our laws and it must manage our borders. But balanced against those demands is the duty of a democratic government to deal fairly and with justice with some of the most consequential decisions that a government can make—decisions regarding detention, deportation and transfer of individuals who lack the power or the platform to defend themselves.”
“Australians do not need new fossil fuel projects. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has warned that any new fossil fuel projects will take us over the 1.5 degrees of global warming. Australians do not want new gas projects; we want our government to stop approving new fossil fuel projects and to legislate the redirection of gas from the export market to our domestic market for our own use.”
“The Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water is currently undertaking a review of arrangements to supply the eastern states' gas market—a review based on the false proposition that new gas production is required to meet our domestic needs. The myth that Australia has a shortage of gas is a creation of multinational fossil fuel companies. Only 16 per cent of Australian LNG was sold domestically last year. The rest was exported. Some of those exports honour long-term contracts, but a quarter do not. Uncontracted Australian gas is sold every day on the spot market for export to international markets. Australians compete with exporters for our own gas—gas which is taken from us tax free. The IEA reports that the world is heading for an oversupply of oil and gas by 2030. That will leave new projects as stranded assets.”
“It's disjointed and is lacking in contemporary tools to detect and address noncompliance and fraud. That is not the fault of the medical professionals who do their very best within it. I commend this bill to the House, but I do wish that it had more vision and more effect.”
“I do support the goal of improving the integrity of Medicare, but rather than piecemeal pieces of legislation like this we should be looking at big picture Medicare reform. As has been set out innumerable independent reviews, this should strengthen the governance model overseeing Medicare, it should enable continuous monitoring of claims transactions and it should redesign frontline processes and business rules to support earlier identification of fraud and of serious noncompliance. It should redesign the payment system to a level of capability commensurate with the size and complexity of the scheme, and it should review the legislative basis of Medicare to include a more contemporary basis to regulation. As the Philip review found, our Medicare system is overly fragmented.”
“This could include junior doctors, locums and deceased practitioners whose provider numbers were misused. The growing corporatisation of medicine has greatly weakened the previously simple relationship between provider, patient and payment. It often leads to practitioners being utterly unaware of what is being billed in their name. Doctors in public hospitals in particular often have limited oversight of or control over billing undertaken in their names months or years after the fact. As the Philip review found, much of the leakage in the Medicare system stems from errors, not from malice, and we shouldn't conflate the two. We must ensure recovery powers are exercised with fairness and discretion. Innocent medical practitioners can't be held liable for systemic failures or even criminal acts beyond their control.”
“While these are limited to certain circumstances, the fact that they include cases in which the practitioner is not the subject of the original investigation is concerning. There's a reasonable concern that the change might undermine the principle of procedural fairness and risk lessened cooperation with investigations by those bodies. If medical professionals fear that any information they provide may later be used later to prosecute them, it's hardly surprising that they may hesitate to engage with those investigations. Finally, the bill introduces new powers to recover overpayments from practitioners even if they were not responsible for the error, even if they did not receive the funds, even if they were victims of fraud. The only requirement is that the practitioner was named on the claim form.”
“This is a profound shift in the settings around such inquiries, and doctors very understandably have real concerns that these changes could override privacy protections under the Privacy Act and legal professional privilege. There's also a significant degree of nervousness amongst medical professionals regarding the Professional Services Review and other professional compliance bodies. These concerns relate to a lack of transparency in their processes. Those fears might well be exacerbated by this bill's removal of restrictions on the admission of information obtained under the Professional Services Review agency's notices to other investigations, such as those commissioned by Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency or the Medical Board.”
“In fact as late as last week the Minister for Health and Ageing was proposing further changes to the MBS. It is little wonder that GPs and other health professionals struggle to keep up with compliance. This bill grants the chief executive of Medicare and their delegates expansive powers which are some concern. Under new section 129AACA any person, not just providers, can be compelled to produce relevant material within 21 days. This includes patients' records, correspondence and billing data. There is no requirement for a warrant, no judicial oversight and no obligation to explain why that information is needed. Failure to comply within 21 days is an strict liability offence with penalties of up to $50,000.”
“There are a number of real and increasing vulnerabilities in our Medicare system, which were described and elucidated in the Philip review. These include the changing burden of disease in Australia, the necessary and natural changing nature of healthcare delivery over time, the unnecessarily complex and challenging nature of the Medicare Benefits Schedule, the growing corporatisation of medicine in this country, the increasing uptake and complexity of medical billing software, the opaque nature of MBS billing arrangements in public hospitals and the lack of continuous monitoring and compliance services within our public health system. Dr Philip's review acknowledged that, with more than 3000 items, it's impossible to keep up with the MBS. But those changes continue.”
“Ultimately, that review dismissed the claims of an $8 billion fraud, claims which had been widely and harmfully trumpeted in the mainstream media. In fact, the Philip review found that the allegations were both inflated and speculative. The Philip review found that issues with the Medicare compliance of doctors are overwhelmingly caused by the complexity of the system. It found that Medicare is becoming outdated, that it doesn't reflect the changing needs of our healthcare system. Dr Philip cautioned that, without significant attention to the legislation, the governance, the systems, the processes and the tools of our Medicare system, which he found to be currently unfit for purpose, significant levels of fraud could well ensue.”
“I rise today to speak on the Health Legislation Amendment (Improved Medicare Integrity and Other Measures) Bill 2025, a bill which seeks to strengthen the integrity of our Medicare system. It is entirely appropriate that the government take all steps necessary to safeguard the sustainability of our universal healthcare system. Australians deserve confidence that their Medicare contributions are being used responsibly and that our system is well regulated and protected from abuse. The legislation currently before the House came out of the independent review of Medicare integrity and compliance, the Philip review. The Philip review was commissioned by the Minister for Health and Aged Care in November 2022 in response to fairly widespread allegations of widespread fraud in the Medicare system.”
“So I ask the government to rethink its punitive, rushed attitude to this group of vulnerable people; to take very seriously the responsibility that comes with the supermajority that it has; to not bully the parliament in the same way that it proposes to bully these vulnerable people, this cohort of individuals who will have no ability to defend themselves before the law with the removal of such considerations as natural justice; and to treat them with the sort of respect that we, as citizens of this country, expect for ourselves.”
“So, before we enact something which could well prove to be just the very beginning of a pattern of governmental activities, the limits of which are not at this point clear, it makes perfect sense that we subject this legislation to further examination. As a member of the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights, I think that that committee should have the opportunity to examine this legislation. We owe nothing less to our own communities and to all of the vulnerable people in this country who could potentially fall under the limits of this sort of legislation in the future than to legislate it with justice and with the sort of patience that decisions of this magnitude deserve.”
“What we're seeing with this government and this rushed legislation is a desire to remove noncitizens to a third-party country, one which is economically vulnerable and houses fewer than 11,000 citizens of its own, such that this cohort would constitute a significant percentage of the population of that country should they all be rehoused there, while implementing what is essentially a system of bullyboy tactics, where we're offering the government of Nauru huge sums of money to rehouse people because we simply can't deal with them domestically. This legislation flies in the face of the values of our community; it flies in the face of the fundamentals of our legal system.”
“So what the government is seeking to do with this legislation is to retrospectively change the law, to move the goalposts and to remove the requirement for natural justice. That phrase in and of itself—removal of the requirement for natural justice, procedural fairness, for people who are noncitizens, when we would expect nothing less from our government for ourselves in that regard—is deeply concerning.”
“It's the government's job to ensure national security, to protect the nation, to enforce our laws and to manage our borders. But it's also the government's job to act as a democratic government, to deal fairly and justly with some of the most consequential decisions that a government can make—decisions about the deportation, detention and transfer of vulnerable individuals who lack the ability or the power to defend themselves. We've seen, in relation to the NZYQ cohort and the way that the government has chosen to deal with it, a really concerning tendency to keep moving the goalposts when they don't suit the government. What we've seen is that the government is unhappy with the High Court rulings around it that its actions have previously been illegal.”
“I rise to support the motion moved by the member for Curtin, and I do that because so many members of my Kooyong community have contacted the electorate office in the last week with their grave concerns around the precedent set by this piece of legislation. All of us care about community safety. Certainly, in Victoria, we've had a significant increase in the incidence of aggravated burglaries and home invasions in recent years. They cause fear and anxiety, and the reports that we've seen in the media regarding the activities of some of the cohort that this legislation is targeted at have raised considerable concern. All of us care about keeping Australians safe; all of us care about protecting our borders, and it's the government's job to do that.”
“We need to give those people who are already struggling with the difficulties, the sadnesses and the loss associated with having a disability or having a family member with a disability the certainty that the government is here for them—that it will always ensure the services they need will be provided and will be funded adequately. The government's recent legislation around NDIS service delivery has not done that. It has exacerbated the uncertainties that consumers, constituents, individuals living with a disability and the people who care for them are experiencing. To that end it has been actively unhelpful, and it is something the government should rethink and remediate as a matter of urgency.”
“Given the uncertainty about the future of foundational supports and how they can possibly be rolled out in an adequate timeframe to the extent they are required in this country, the speed of these changes to service delivery and supports is just exacerbating a situation of unacceptable uncertainty and anxiety for those people who rely on the NDIS and those people who work within it. What we need the government to do is give all those participants of the NDIS—and those people who are not currently supported by it but who would benefit from it—the foundational supports the minister has suggested, which are a good idea but for which the current mechanisms are, to be frank, non-existent. What we need is a timeframe and certainty around how we can best support all Australians.”
“The Australian Physiotherapy Association, which I'm very proud to have centred in my own electorate of Kooyong, has expressed extreme distress at the speed and extent of the changes the government has made to funding around the scheme. Occupational therapists, speech pathologists and play therapists have all expressed the same concerns. The reality is that these changes have been pushed through far too quickly. They have caused great distress to the therapists who provide these services, and they've exacerbated the ongoing stress on recipients of the scheme resulting from the sound and fury emanating from the health and disability minister at this point in time.”
“Unfortunately my colleagues on the right have for many years viewed the NDIS as potentially something which could be scrapped and which could go, so the NDIS has been under considerable political pressure for a long period of time. Those people who work within the scheme—the providers, whether they be allied health professionals or medical professionals—find it to be an endless source of frustration. I can tell you that having worked within the scheme for many years as a medical professional. The government's recent changes to the scheme, which were made far too quickly and without consideration, have caused those medical professionals and allied health professionals undue stress, trauma and tension at a time when there's already uncertainty and anxiety around the future of the NDIS.”
“The NDIS is a foundational scheme which is extraordinarily important to those Australians who are lucky enough to be engaged with it. We know that 5½ million Australians live with a disability, but only 700,000 Australians are currently on the National Disability Insurance Scheme. We know that those people who are on it describe it as life-changing. For many people it has offered them an opportunity to exercise the choice and control within their own life that they have never previously enjoyed. It is an incredibly important scheme. But all of us in this place know that the cost blowouts we've seen in recent years threaten its viability.”
“They were given three options: to move Jeremy to another group home, to find a new home with a different provider or to stay put and try to source a new SIL provider themselves. Jeremy's family has received no direct guidance from the NDIA, despite asking for help on multiple occasions. That help has not been forthcoming. They have no clear pathway to ensure his continuity of care. The system is failing them. This is not just around Jeremy. This reflects a system that leaves families to navigate really complex transitions alone, so I'm calling for the NDIA to do its job and provide quality care for all people with a disability.”
“Across Australia, supported independent living providers are withdrawing from specialist disability accommodation settings. They're leaving families scrambling to secure care for their loved ones. This issue is particularly acute in Victoria, where an oversupply of SDA dwellings, workforce shortages and regulatory uncertainty are making it really hard for providers to stay in the market. One of my constituents, Jeremy Lipshut, has profound autism and is non-verbal. He requires full-time support. He's lived in the same group home in Camberwell since 2008. It's been his only adult home. In July, his family was told that Scope, his SIL provider, was withdrawing from the system.”
“It will not ensure that our health system is ready to evaluate and fund the next generation of personalised medicines, digital health tools and breakthrough therapies. Cheaper medicines are good, but faster access to the best medicines for all Australians is better. We need a system that recognises the complexity and wonder of modern medicine, one which is agile enough to respond to emerging health needs, one which puts patients, not bureaucracy, at its centre. So, I urge the Minister for Health and Ageing to prioritise the full and urgent implementation of the HTA review recommendations. I do support this bill, but I also call on this parliament to look beyond it, to build a health system which is not just cheaper but smarter, fairer and faster. Australians deserve more than just cheaper medicines.”
“Those companies have variously criticised our PBS for allowing generic medicines to compete in the market, for freeloading by contributing insufficiently to the cost of research and development of new drugs and for taking years to approve new medicines and thereby creating a massive backlog of approvals. The Albanese government has rightly defended the PBS, and I think everyone in this place would do that. But the fact is that our therapeutic goods approval bodies would benefit by not being beyond reasonable criticism, because the criticism that they have received is reasonable. They are slow and they are overly administratively burdensome. So this bill, while it is important, will not address the systemic delays that prevent Australians from accessing new therapies. It will not fix the bottlenecks in the TGA, the PBAC or the MSAC.”
“In response to that review, which was released, as you will remember, in late 2024, the Health Technology Assessment Review Implementation Advisory Group was established in November 2024, but there has been very limited progress since that time. Patients are still waiting. Their parents and the people who care for them are still waiting. Clinicians are still waiting. Researchers and industry are still waiting for action on the HTA review. We cannot afford to wait any longer. The fact is that the PBS system which we all treasure has recently come under significant and renewed attack from large international pharmaceutical companies which have successfully mobilised the US government to apply pressure here and in other countries with schemes similar to the PBS.”
“The health technology assessment review was commissioned by the department of health in 2021 in response to a report from the joint standing committee on health, disability and ageing. That review was released in 2024. It exposed critical shortcomings in how Australia evaluates and funds new medicines and technologies. Those issues directly affect the speed and ease with which Australians can access novel life-saving therapies. The review called for a more transparent, more timely, more patient centred approach to the evaluation of new treatments. It recognised the need to better incorporate real-world evidence, consumer input and health equity into decision-making.”
“Both yesterday and today I've met in the House with vaccine providers, who have discussed their frustration with the barriers to approvals and funding in this country, particularly with respect to the mishmash of federal and state support for immunisation programs. I've often heard in Kooyong and in Canberra from constituents and carers frustrated by the variability of vaccine schedules from state to state and the variable funding of administration of vaccines by councils or by community pharmacists in different territories and states. The health technology assessment system is the backbone of how we assess, approve and fund new medicines and medical technologies in Australia.”
“The PBS listings that were announced in this year's budget are a step forward for women's health. We've been hearing ad nauseum from the government about new listings for oral contraceptives, menopause and endometriosis. That's fantastic, but, if those women's HRT agents are unavailable, they find themselves having to settle for poor alternatives at a higher price. And they're not alone. Hundreds of medications are in short supply in this country at any one point in time. I've heard from palliative care physicians who can't get hold of the right forms of morphine for patients who are in pain and who are dying. I've heard from parents who can't get their kids' ADHD medications. I've heard of people who can't access their cardiac medications and the antibiotics that they want, need and deserve.”
“This is the best form of radiotherapy for brain tumours and many other forms of cancer. Despite attempts to bring it to our country, despite failed attempts by the South Australian and Victorian governments, proton therapy is still not available in Australia. That means that our children with brain tumours have to go overseas to access it, after their parents—these are parents who are under stress, dealing with the critical illness of their child—have had to jump through the endless hoops of the medical treatment overseas program to get them there. I often hear as well from constituents who are frustrated that they cannot access the medicines they need. I've just spoken in this House about the many constituents who would like to access Novavax vaccines for COVID—can't do it.”
“That is a false economy; we are talking about the health of Australians. Just last week I met with a constituent who recently tried and failed to have an agent fast-tracked under our PBAC. The agent was actually TGA approved years ago; he was just trying to get it funded by the PBAC. He had spent a million dollars trying to get that approval. It failed because the government would not negotiate significantly on price. He's been offered the chance to reapply under the standard approval pathways, but he asked a very appropriate question: why would he bother? Why would he spend more of his money doing that, with a very limited chance of success? We are not rewarding those who are doing their best to bring new treatments to this country. I've also heard recently from constituents whose children have been unable to access proton therapy.”
“For a clinical trial, it's at least a few months—long months when you've got patients desperate to get access to an exciting new possible therapeutic. For PBAC approvals, it's 22 months. For MSAC approvals, it's 12 to14 months. Horrifyingly, the average time for the approval of a new vaccine under the National Immunisation Program—from the time of TGA approval until listed on the NIP—is 1,375 days. That is 3.8 years. I experienced those timelines firsthand when, after leading world-first clinical trials in children with severe neuromuscular conditions at the Royal Children's Hospital, I had to go, cap in hand, to the TGA and the PBAC and fight to have new medications and gene therapies approved and funded. It took years of advocacy, with families and with pharma, to secure access to those treatments for all Australian children.”
“I was grateful to the government for considering the measure and adopting it. Like this bill, it was aimed at making things easier for Australians dealing with pretty significant cost-of-living pressures. But, while this bill is a positive move, it is not enough. It is a bandaid on a system which requires comprehensive reform. As a paediatric neurologist who worked in a public health system for more than three decades, I know firsthand the importance of timely access to affordable and effective treatments. I also understand the frustration of patients and clinicians when access to life-changing therapies is delayed or denied because of outdated, opaque and slow approval processes. The waits are simply too long in our system. The average wait for approval under the Therapeutic Goods Administration is 12 months.”
“This was a welcome change, which is expected to save more than $1.6 billion over four years for patients on stable doses of medication living with chronic conditions. I have to say, though, that we've had relatively low uptake of the scheme to date. Only 21 per cent of eligible medicines were dispensed as 60-day scripts by the end of last year. Despite that, the policy has already saved consumers more than $110 million. If uptake increases to 50 per cent, annual savings could exceed $310 million for patients and $297 million for the government, primarily through reduced dispensing fees. I have to take some credit for this government's savings because I was the first person to raise this issue—the possibility of this policy change in the House—when I asked the minister if he would consider it, in early 2023.”
“I rise today in support of the National Health Amendment (Cheaper Medicines) Bill 2025, a bill which will deliver tangible cost-of-living relief to millions of Australians by reducing the maximum Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme co-payment from $31.60 to $25 from 1 January 2026. This is a welcome step. It will save families hundreds of dollars a year, and it will make essential medicines more accessible to those who need them most. This government has done a lot to make medicines more affordable. In the last term of government, it brought in the 60-day prescription policy, which allows up to 12 months of medication at a time from a single script, with two months worth being dispensed at a time.”
“The people in this place should be asking: What is in the best interests of the people of Australia? With this deal from 2021, what is being promised to the Australian taxpayer in 2025 and beyond? How can we guarantee a fair and equal playing field for business investments in this country? How can we encourage research and development and build sovereign capacity for medicine production when we are committing to these sorts of deals? How do we best protect and preserve the health of all Australians? To that end, I move that this instrument be disallowed, to give the parliament of Australia an opportunity to investigate these really important questions and to act transparently and in the best interests of the health and wellbeing of our constituents.”
“Companies which didn't receive taxpayer gifts upfront do not have the same capacity to invest. A business environment characterised by uncompetitive deals is an active deterrent to other companies which might be considering capitalising on Australia's medical research expertise, companies which are considering investing locally in the research and development required to bring new and improved products to our market. A guarantee to a single company to fast-track approvals for their product while their competitors wait three years or more for the same approvals is anticompetitive. It's a deterrent to new research and development, for which we will all be the poorer. We need our government to always act in the public's best interest, with honesty and transparency. That is more important than ever when it comes to health care.”
“We don't know what HDA criteria and assessments will apply to the vaccines produced by this facility. We don't know how they're going to vary from the standard processes. But we do know that the government has actively disapplied the usual rules around competition, value for money, merits review and regulatory impact assessments. And remember that this special treatment is not just for pandemic vaccines. It specifically includes non-pandemic vaccines. There is no possible justification for this carve-out. The usual safeguards for procurement should apply. The usual standards of best product at best value should apply to non-pandemic vaccines produced by the Moderna facility. Giving a single commercial entity a sweetheart deal undermines competition.”
“It's wholly appropriate that governments invoke human health considerations during a pandemic. During the COVID-19 pandemic acute phases, both Pfizer and Moderna benefited from alternative health technology assessment processes. We needed those expedited pathways because of the longstanding issues with medical regulatory pathways in this country. Those issues persist. To its credit this government commissioned the health technology assessment review in 2022, but it reported in May 2024, and it's still not scheduling implementation of its recommendations until 2026. That is too slow. We need faster medication approvals. We need to ensure that we are better prepared for the next pandemic. Now is the time to improve the TGA, the PBAC and MSAC, not to build cut-outs for our favoured partners.”
“The government's arrangement with Moderna is the biggest change to vaccine procurement in Australian history. It gives a massive commercial advantage to one company by making a multibillion contribution to the construction of a new, single facility and to the servicing of its operations, with no transparency as to what, if any, ownership we have of that infrastructure and the ongoing operations of the facility. It gives one single company access to expedited procurement processes, remembering that it takes on average 3.8 years for the PBAC to approve new vaccines in this country. In doing so, this agreement disadvantages other vaccine manufacturers. It creates a disincentive for other companies to invest or expand here. In seeking to build capacity, we are potentially stifling it.”
“These are options which could have significant spillover benefits for Australian medical research capability and for our commercialisation skills. Do we need to support medical research in Australia? We certainly do, which is why I've been asking the minister to immediately release funds from the Medical Research Future Fund to universities and medical research institutes, which are struggling in a time of decreased local funding for research and development, and at a time when support of Australian medical research by the NIH and other US sources has decreased by $368 million in this year alone. Why is this deal so concerning? Australia's decades-old system of vaccine procurement ensures that safe, effective and cost-effective vaccines are purchased and provided to the Australian people.”
“For years, I have been pushing for more support for local medicines production, which we could facilitate through schemes like A Future Made in Australia. But we have no certainty that putting this very large egg in this single basket is going to help our pharmaceutical industry, our vaccines industry, even just our mRNA industry to strengthen and diversify, or that it will provide continuity of local vaccine production before and after this contract expires in 2032. We don't know if the government has looked at other options open to it under the existing facility establishment agreement, such as expanding expenditure for research and development or for manufacturing for research rather than vaccines.”