There’s a lot of chatter about Scott Morrison being the worst PM ever and Anthony Albanese being boring and uninspiring. But this is not the biggest leadership crisis in Australian politics right now. The lack of leadership in the health portfolio is far more concerning.
Greg Hunt has never been a great Health Minister in my view. He stood me up not long after I founded Migraine Australia in 2019, which probably wasn’t a great start to the relationship. His staff took the meeting, which was fine, but their assurances and offers on various points never materialised. By the time Hunt was calling us ‘astroturf’ on the floor of the parliament 8 months later – because that’s how this Government treats effective advocates with reasonable requests, they get called liars – I was fairly well done with him.
Hunt isn’t at all interested in ensuring people have access to the health care they need, he only cares about the announceable. Drugs for small groups of patients gets so many more announcements onto his calendar for a smaller amount of money than one relatively affordable drug for millions of patients, so common conditions like Migraine can get stuffed.
After two years of fighting, we did eventually get two of the new drugs on the PBS last year with extremely tight restrictions. In a nutshell, you need to be completely debilitated by migraine before they’ll give you the drugs that work. And the Government will only pay for 10,000 patients, a number passed in the first quarter. Over 16,000 Australians have started treatment on Emgality or Ajovy in just the first 6 months. Remembering that you have to see a neurologist to get it, that’s a gobsmacking figure.
Unfortunately, the two new migraine drugs we did get on the PBS – Emgality and Ajovy – don’t work for me, and the one that does – Aimovig – is still costing me $695 a month. Without Aimovig, I am completely debilitated and require care. With it, I’m absolutely fine. So, I find the $695 every single month, and every single time I pay it I curse a Health Minister more interested in making the announcement than doing the right thing.
I’m glad Hunt is retiring. I’d prefer he went now so we didn’t have a lame duck Health Minister in the middle of a pandemic. But there’s no need for anyone effective in the job when the alternative isn’t really on the job either.
During separate conversations with two fellow health advocates this week it came up that Labor’s Mark Butler, the Shadow Health Minister, seems utterly uninterested in the health portfolio. He just doesn’t seem to care enough to engage with the subject matter.
By contrast, dealing with Chris Bowen when he was the Shadow Health Minister, and his phenomenally impressive team, was a delight. He was engaged, intellectually interested in the incredibly complex and fraught issues within the health portfolio and came to the table ready to work. Bowen understood – before the pandemic – the flow on implications that health has to the economy and many other parts of our nation.
Meanwhile, Butler’s office can’t even manage to do a social media message for annual health awareness events. I’d given up even bothering to email his office long before I stood down from my role in Migraine Australia last month.
When we do get out of this pandemic, we’re going to need to completely rebuild our health system. But we’re going into an election not knowing who the health minister will be if the Coalition wins, and a guy who doesn’t really want the job if Labor wins.
This is not ok. This is a threat to our health.
In last week’s KORE Poll there were many insights about the white hot level of hate towards Morrison and the ‘meh’ response to Albanese, but there was also a strong message that people are very scared.
And people are right to be scared; there is currently no leadership from either side of politics in what will be the most important portfolio for the next decade.
End rant.
Begin Rant: 