address to parliament - CONSTITUENCY STATEMENTS - Health Care

Jane Gentle is a caring person—you could almost say by name and by nature. But she says what she thinks, she means what she says and she says what she means. She's been a pharmacist for 23 years—19 of those have been as an owner of a chemist operation. She runs a pharmacy in Junee, a town of 6½ thousand people. Hers was the only pharmacy in town which was trading seven days a week, but she's had to cut back that seventh day. She's now closing, from December, on the Sunday. This is so unfortunate. She's doing it because the doctors in town aren't working on Sundays but also because of the recent government changes regarding 60-day dispensing. The chickens are coming home to roost.

They're coming home to roost, unfortunately, particularly in rural, regional and remote areas. I know the health minister crows about cheaper medicines in question time, but the 60-day dispensing is going to affect—and it is affecting—our pharmacists, their ability to make income and their ability to trade. Ultimately, it will see chemists closing. This just isn't good enough. It's not just happening in Junee; it's also happening at Southcity Pharmacy at Wagga Wagga. I spoke with Jane. She says, about the 60-day dispensing, that it hasn't hit hard yet but it will. 'It will be a death by a thousand cuts,' she says, because they are doing it in stages. It wasn't an easy decision for her to make. What this meant was that many of the people in the district of the Riverina—Cootamundra, Temora, West Wyalong and Gundagai—went to Junee because they didn't have a chemist open on a Sunday. Well, they won't be able to now.

You put up a post on X, formerly Twitter, and you get the usual city-centric view of this—that the demand for a chemist in a town of 6½ thousand people on a Sunday already wouldn't be high. Go figure. Then somebody else says, 'Within a 30-minute drive, there are a number of chemists open in Wagga on Sunday.' I defy anybody to drive from Junee to Wagga Wagga in 30 minutes. Be that as it may, people just think that country people don't matter. They think that we're second-rate citizens. Jane and her team want to make sure that people in Junee are well served, but the 60-day dispensing is not serving our chemists or our populations well at all. It's simply not good enough that the minister isn't listening to these people. They need to go back to the drawing board, they need to review the 60-day dispensing rule and they need to make it fairer for all rural people, who need a pharmacist seven days a week.