In Australia, access to high‑quality, innovative and affordable medicines isn’t just a nice‑to‑have, it’s fundamental to who we are as a country.
Modern medicines are helping people recover faster, avoid complications, and stay well for longer.
Diseases that were once considered terminal now often have much better outcomes.
In cancers especially, five year survival rates keep improving because we’re lucky to be living in an turbo-charged era of medical discovery.
These breakthroughs don’t come without pressure.
These incredible new treatments are stretching business models just as they stretch government budgets, but the gains they have given us in lives saved and lives extended far outweigh their cost in dollar terms.
As the Productivity Commission put it, “we’ve spent more on health care, but it’s been worth it.”
When medicines are more effective and more affordable, people can manage their conditions and stay engaged in work.
And when people stay in work, they contribute to a stronger, more resilient economy.
We don’t say this often enough: medicines policy is economic policy.
When someone avoids a hospitalisation, reduces complications, or returns to work sooner, the benefits ripple well beyond the health system.
The international evidence backs this up.
Studies in comparable economies show advances in medicines translate into measurable gains in productive work time and earnings.
In Australia, we only fund new medicines when the evidence shows they genuinely work and offer good value for taxpayers.
That principle, embedded in the PBS, is one reason why Australia continues to have one of the highest performing health systems in the world at a sustainable cost.
When we strengthen access to effective therapies, we strengthen both health outcomes and national productivity.
The PBS has long been at the heart of that effort.
It ensures Australians can access a broad spectrum of medicines when they need them, from routine prescriptions to increasingly complex, personalised therapies.
More and more, the medicines coming through are targeted and tailored to the patient.
Many of these personalised therapies are for the treatment of cancer. In this year alone, the PBS has listed a suite of cancer immunotherapies drugs, many of which are life-changing for the patients that receive them.
One example that captures this is Carvykti, which was listed on the PBS last month.
It’s an innovative therapy for adults with multiple myeloma whose disease has relapsed or is no longer responding to treatment.
Eligible Australians can now access this therapy for free instead of facing a cost of around $200,000.
More than 14,000 Australians are living with multiple myeloma, and access like this matters enormously.
To me, this is the PBS at its best.
But the reality is that the PBS, in its current form, was designed for another era – one where drugs were funded to address health challenges at a population level, not an individual one.
It’s been decades since we’ve seen a single medicine benefit very large numbers of Australians in the way statins do, for example.
But breakthrough therapies are emerging that could once again improve health at a population level.
Take GLP‑1 medicines for example.
They represent the kind of shift that could reshape population health outcomes, but also expose the limits of a system designed for a different era.
The PBS was built on equitable access, and preserving that requires careful, responsible decisions.
As new therapies emerge, particularly those with broad population reach and significant cost, we need to bring them into the system in a measured way.
The PBS must evolve, but it cannot lose sight of its core purpose: affordable, reliable access to medicines for all Australians.
Our task is to ensure breakthroughs strengthen the PBS rather than overwhelm it.
As well as being sustainable, the PBS must remain nimble enough to evaluate value, affordability and access in a way that continues to protect patients while also protecting the integrity of the system.
And this is against the backdrop of the state of the global medicines system, which is currently in a state of enormous flux.
Policies like the United States’ Most Favoured Nations approach are reshaping how companies think about pricing.
Global price compression can affect whether companies bring new medicines to markets like Australia.
This challenge is not ours alone. We are closely watching how countries like the UK, Europe and Japan are responding to MFN as we determine the best approach to protect and defend the PBS.
Even before these shifts, I have been clear that the PBS needs reform.
We are seeing situations where innovative therapies are held back because of how they would be assessed against older, much cheaper medicines.
At the same time, global pricing dynamics mean that accepting heavily compressed prices in Australia can have broader international consequences.
What some describe as a ‘reckoning’ reflects a wider shift, as more innovative therapies come to market at pace and often at higher cost.
In 2010, the most expensive medicine on the PBS cost around $24,000 per patient. By 2024, that figure had reached $2.5 million.
This is why the Health Technology Assessment Review was so important.
It confirmed we have a good system, but that it can be better.
It also identified practical ways to modernise, from reducing duplication to streamlining processes.
That work is now underway.
I am consulting with industry, patient groups and clinicians to ensure the system keeps pace with scientific advances.
The PBS is both a health program and an economic stabiliser that helps Australians afford medicines, stay well, and participate fully in life.
Reforms like 60‑day prescriptions and lower co‑payments reflect a simple belief: access to medicines drives both equity and economic strength.
And as new therapies emerge, we must ensure Australians can access them affordably, sustainably and fairly.
