Health

Worth knowing which.

Seeing a doctor or filling a script shouldn't be something a working family has to budget around. So it's worth looking at how the people asking for your vote have treated it.

Here's the one that stopped us in our tracks. Back in 2014, Cory Bernardi (now One Nation's South Australia leader) argued that patients should be charged more to see the doctor – and that the money they paid should go towards paying down government debt. Not towards health, but towards debt. He was backing a plan to put a $7 charge on every visit to a bulk-billing GP, blood tests and scans included.

We went back through the record, and it wasn't a one-off.

2014 – a charge to see the GP

Cory Bernardi backed the Abbott government's proposed $7 charge on every bulk-billing GP visit, and argued the money raised should go towards government debt rather than medical research. The charge never came in, but it's his own record.

2014 – billions from public hospitals

The same year, Barnaby Joyce and Cory Bernardi voted for a federal Budget that cut $54 billion in projected public hospital funding – money the states had been counting on to run their hospitals, including in the regions.

2023 – cheaper medicines

The government brought in 60-day dispensing, letting patients get two months of a regular medicine on a single script instead of one – saving up to $180 a year on some medicines, and halving trips to the chemist. Pauline Hanson and Malcolm Roberts opposed it, moving to disallow the change in the Senate.

2025 – dental care

Hanson voted no on the Senior Dental Benefits Scheme, a Senate motion to expand publicly funded dental care. She'd already voted the same way in 2018, on an earlier push to expand “Denticare” access, including to pensioners.

2026 – Medicare provider numbers

Barnaby Joyce proposed denying new doctors a Medicare provider number until they'd done regional service. Patients seeing an affected doctor would get no rebate at all – around $44 more on a standard visit, every time.

What they've done, not what they say

It's only fair to show both sides, and we will. One Nation's own health policy talks a good game – more doctors and nurses, a higher Medicare rebate. But a policy on a website isn't a vote in parliament, and this whole site is about what parties have actually done. So we look at the votes. On the GP charge, on hospital funding, on 60-day dispensing, on dental, One Nation figures have repeatedly voted to make care harder to get or dearer to reach.

There's one recent vote the other way – in 2025 Hanson, Roberts and Whitten voted to bring the PBS co-payment down from $25 to $20, and that's a genuine vote for cheaper medicines. But weigh it against the rest of the record, and decide for yourself which way the pattern runs.

Don't take our word for any of it. Every vote and statement here is on the public record – check it yourself at theyvoteforyou.org.au or on the Australian Parliament's website.