Minister for Health and Aged Care, press conference - 7 December 2024

MINISTER FOR HEALTH AND AGED CARE, MARK BUTLER: First of all, can I say thanks to Pro Health Care here on Port Road for hosting us today. This has been a really important primary care practice for the western suburbs. I've been really familiar with it for many, many years, operating for a quarter of a century in this part of Adelaide under different names, but now Pro Health Care. I'm really delighted to be joined here by Ben, who will talk to us shortly from AstraZeneca. Professor Shaw, who is a world authority on type 2 diabetes, in particular, the Deputy Director of the Baker Diabetes and Heart Institute over in Melbourne, and also Keith, who's been bragging to us about the fact he's going to Bali for 18 days in a couple of days, but a patient living with type 2 diabetes who will be able to talk about his experience.

Type 2 diabetes is the fastest growing common chronic condition in Australia. We think there are around 1.2 million Australians with a formal diagnosis of type 2 diabetes, and maybe as many as half a million who are living without a formal diagnosis. As I said, it's fast growing. We have about 125 new diagnoses every single day. As I'm sure Professor Shaw will tell you, in itself, it leads to very serious heart problems, very serious health problems, including for the heart, for the kidney, for the eyes, for feet and many other parts of the body as well. About 30 per cent of type 2 diabetes patients also have cardiovascular disease, which is still the largest killer of Australians. Dealing with type 2 diabetes is one of the most significant health challenges that this country has right now. There are some really effective treatments on the PBS, two of which are Forxiga and a combination treatment of Forxiga with metformin that provides very significant relief in terms of lowering glucose levels and preventing some of those health problems that I just talked about. The challenge, though, has been to get access to that those medicines at PBS prices. You've had to satisfy a clinician that your blood sugar levels are at a particularly high level. The glycaemic levels has been a requirement for PBS access.

I'm delighted to say that from today, clinicians, doctors, GPs and specialists, will be able to prescribe these life changing treatments to patients much earlier in their diabetes journey so before they've had to show excess sugar levels, giving them relief sooner, and giving them relief before some of this lasting health damage is done. It will provide an extraordinary amount of support, not just in terms of the quality of life for hundreds of thousands of diabetes patients, but also their productivity, their ability to go about work and other parts of life as well.

Not only will this treatment provide huge changes and huge support for hundreds of thousands of Australians, but it will also make it much cheaper as well. Our Government has such a laser up focus on making medicines cheaper. For a pensioner or for concession card holder, this decision today will drop the price of these medicines by about 85 per cent and for a general patient, it will halve the cost of those medicines, making it much more likely, particularly at a time of cost of living pressure, that when a doctor says these medicines will change your life, everyone will be in the best position possible to be able to afford it.

I want to thank particularly Professor Shaw, who's been a driver of this change. This decision follows a long period of reviews by our medicines experts on the Pharmaceutical Benefits Advisory Committee, having a look at the usage of these medicines outside of the PBS and as a result of the input from world experts like Professor Shaw, but from consumer groups as well, I'm delighted we're able to take this decision, which we think will impact about 116,000 patients each and every year. This is a big share of Australia's diabetes population. I hand over now to Ben to talk about this from AstraZeneca perspective.
 
BEN MCDONALD, ASTRAZENECA COUNTRY PRESIDENT AUSTRALIA AND NEW ZEALAND: I'm Ben McDonald country president for AstraZeneca in Australia and in New Zealand. I'd like to thank Minister Butler and the Australian Government for enabling much more access to Forxiga and to Xigduo, which is a combination of for Forxiga with metformin on the PBS. I'd also like to thank Professor Shaw, who's here with us today, and also Keith Bennett, who is a patient living with type 2 diabetes. Thank you for joining us today. This is a major shift in the management of diabetes in Australia. Thanks to this PBS listing, hundreds of thousands more patients may now get the benefit of Forxiga and Xigduo XR. It is really a major shift for Australian diabetes patients. This particular PBS listing means that patients with type 2 diabetes now don't need to wait until their blood sugar levels increase to a certain point they can now access Forxiga and Xigduo XR earlier. We'll continue to work with the Australian Government to ensure earlier, faster, fairer access for medicines in Australia and we're very proud of this PBS listing.
 
PROFESSOR JONATHON SHAW, DEPUTY DIRECTOR (CLINICAL AND POPULATION HEALTH), AND HEAD OF CLINICAL DIABETES AND EPIDEMIOLOGY, BAKER HEART AND DIABETES INSTITUTE: It's really great to see this change that is coming about at the moment. I'll just give you a little bit of background about where this has come from and what this really means. For over a decade now, we've been using dapagliflozin, Forxiga, as a drug that lowers the blood glucose. It's a very important thing to do for people with type 2 diabetes. After it had been released 10 years ago or so, it turned out from a number of clinical trials that there was a really beneficial effect of this medication, not just on lowering the glucose, but also on protecting the heart and protecting the kidneys. Now, rather surprisingly, it turned out that that benefit was not actually due to the effect on blood glucose, that it was some other effect. We shouldn't really have been surprised about this, because type 2 diabetes is a rather complex condition. It isn't just too much sugar, it's a whole range of things that are not quite right. It's blood pressure, it’s cholesterol, it's the way the blood vessels function, so it's not a surprise that there are other things other than correcting blood glucose that will help to prevent heart disease and some of the other complications of diabetes. It really became apparent that the use of this kind of drug shouldn't just be restricted to those people who've got high blood sugar as part of their type 2 diabetes, but those people who are at high risk of cardiovascular disease, even if their blood sugar is actually quite well controlled. This is really what has been shown in trials in the last five or 10 years, and this is what we're now able to bring to people at the coal face. So instead of last month, when the only situation in which I could prescribe this drug for somebody with type 2 diabetes was if their blood sugar was elevated, now I can look at somebody with type 2 diabetes and say, well, you're at higher risk of heart disease or strokes, maybe kidney disease, but heart disease and strokes. I can now use that drug to lower that risk, and that is really important for them, because, as we just heard from Minister Butler, this is one of the major reasons why people suffer from the consequences of type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular complications, heart disease, strokes, various abnormalities of the circulation. This is a big change in the way that we can use these medications. It will also help to refocus, not only doctors, but also people with diabetes, on the risk of the outcomes such as cardiovascular disease, and not just focus on the number of the blood sugar. It is a very important number, but it's not the only thing to focus on, and this allows us to broaden that focus, and therefore will allow us to broaden the benefits of what we can do to help people with type 2 diabetes. I might hand over to Keith, who's going to give you a real story, rather than just the professionals view it.
 
KEITH BENNETT, PATIENT LIVING WITH TYPE 2 DIABETES: My story, it's been a journey. I was diagnosed around 21 years ago. It's been very frustrating, mainly due to the general lack of education in the general public and also having to wake up every single day in pain and just think “this is how it is and how it has to be”. When I got put on Forxiga, about seven or eight years ago, it's completely changed my life. Some days I even forget that I have it. I can just live a normal life. Moving on down the track, about five, six years ago, I had chest pain, and I had a coughing fit and actually blacked out. I went to see my GP, who sent me to see a cardiologist and two to three days later, I had the stent put in the main artery, and 18 months down the track, another stent put in. Meeting with my GP three weeks ago he's put me on sort of a new medication that I'm very excited about, for what it can do for me and anybody else out there that is in the same situation that I'm in. So, if you've got diabetes cardiovascular problems, don't sit there and do nothing about it. Go see your GP, get on this medication and get your life back on track. Thank you.

JOURNALIST: Keith, if I could just keep you there for a second. You've touched on a bit but how excited or how important is it to you to know that this is available not just to yourself, but to anyone else in your position?

BENNETT: My son in law, is on this medication, and it's very expensive for him, so now halve what he's paying now, and for anybody else that needs medication, which is at the cost of living, the dose is very important.

JOURNALIST: How has your diabetes affected your sort of day to day life?

BENNETT: It hasn't really affected it, but in taking my medication regularly, I struggled with that. I had the wrong foods. It's been a struggle for me three weeks now. I've taken my medication regularly every night, for the slow release overnight works better, and for the benefits that it's going to give me, for my diabetes, my heart and everything else that does. So, yeah, I'm very excited. I can't wait the next two months to get my blood results to see what's happening.

JOURNALIST: Is it peace of mind?

BENNETT: Yes, definitely.

JOURNALIST: You can't put a price on that?

BENNETT: No, and we're off to Bali on Tuesday so I want to keep going.
 
JOURNALIST: Just in regards to Melbourne synagogue yesterday morning, what's your reaction? And Benjamin Netanyahu has accused the Australian Government of being anti-Israel. What's your response to that as well?

BUTLER: Well, I don't accept that characterisation. The first thing I would say is the attack on the synagogue yesterday morning was utterly appalling. A particularly hateful act of antisemitism to target a place of worship. We know that Jewish Australians have been dealing with an utterly appalling rise in antisemitism since the 7^th of October attacks by Hamas terrorist attacks that killed more Jewish people on a single day than had been killed since the Holocaust on a single day. We still have around 100 hostages. The appalling conflict that was kicked off by this terrorist attack by Hamas has reaped awful damage in the region, obviously, in Israel and in the Palestinian territories, but it's led to very serious conflict in the Australian community as well, and Jewish Australians have borne the brunt of that. The rise in antisemitism has been very sharp and very hateful. It has targeted schools. I've said before, it has targeted aged care facilities, where Jewish Australians towards the end of their life, some of them Holocaust survivors, are having to spend their last weeks and months on this earth under security guard because of threats to their safety, in just another appalling act of antisemitism. This firebombing of the synagogue is only the most recent of a long chain of antisemitic acts that have been happening here in Australia that I and other members of the government have called out, and we call this one out. The perpetrators of this must be found and they must be subject to the full force of the law that obviously, primarily is the responsibility of the Victorian Police. The Prime Minister was briefed yesterday by the commissioner of the Federal Police and has committed any support that the Victorians need from the AFP and other Commonwealth authorities for that matter. Now as to the comments from the Israeli Prime Minister, I will point out that our Prime Minister spoke with the Israeli president, President Herzog, yesterday, and they had a very productive discussion about the shared values we have to combat this appalling rise in antisemitism. We've already got a range of things that we've been doing since the 7^th of October attacks.

I will say this, I particularly am enormously proud of the relationship that Australia has had with Israel since Australia was the first vote cast in favour of the creation of the State of Israel back in 1948. We played a really important role as a country in the creation of a state of Israel after the horrors of the Holocaust, and that for me, will always be a matter of pride for our country, and for me personally. Now that doesn't mean that the governments always agree on everything, but we continue to value our relationship with Israel very, very highly. It's an important democracy in a very challenging region that is currently dealing with conflict on a range of different fronts. Not just the southern front from Gaza, there's a ceasefire now, but they have been under attack from Hezbollah on the northern front since the day after the 7^th of October, attacks, as well as attacks from Iran on the eastern front. We have great sympathy with the pressure and conflict that Israel is under. The Prime Minister has made our position clear on the attacks on the synagogue, as he's made our position clear on the votes that took place over recent days in the United Nation, votes where we were joined, not just with another 155 or so countries, but with four of the five, five eyes countries. We voted along with New Zealand, Canada, UK, and many other countries we’re considered to be like minded as well.
 
JOURNALIST: What is your message to the Jewish community?
 
BUTLER: Our message to the Jewish community is we want to do everything we possibly can to keep you safe and to make you feel safe. It is appalling that parents, Jewish parents, here in Australia, worry about their kids going to school. Jewish schools are the only ones in this country where kids are locked behind high security fences with barbed wire and security guards and often police presence as well, because of the threats to their safety, some of that pre-existed the October 7 attacks. Frankly, the level of antisemitism that has taken place here in Australia since those from us terrorist attacks is just appalling. We've been doing all that we can to assist the community to remain safe, including monetary grants to the Executive Council of Australia Jewry to bolster the security of places like schools and synagogues, but also putting in place laws through the parliament that reaffirm our opposition to hate symbols, particularly the Nazi salute, to doxing, which is now unlawful because of legislation that we've passed. We've got to redouble our efforts, not just as governments, but as a community, to stamp this out. It is an awful conflict going on right now in the Middle East, and we have to do what we can as a middle power, quite far removed from the actual conflict itself, to play a role in the United Nations and others, to try and bring that conflict to an end and to do what we've all been wanting to see happen, and that is a two state solution, but we also need to prevent that conflict coming to our own country. I think that's what the overwhelming number of Australians want. They don't want to see that conflict brought to Australia and the act of violence, the appalling act of violence the other night is just one example of that. We've seen too many of them since October 7^th.
 
JOURNALIST: Following on from those comments from Benjamin Netanyahu do you think that has the potential to create some conflict between the two governments, Australia and Israel?
 
BUTLER: Our relationship, as I said, goes back to 1948 to relationship with which personally, I'm enormously proud. I will always be proud of the role Australia played in the creation of the State of Israel after the Holocaust. I still think it was absolutely the right thing to do, and I will stand by that decision for as long as I live. But that doesn't mean that there are not points of disagreement. We have points of disagreement with a whole range of countries with whom we have friendly relations, including other liberal democracies as well. The Prime Minister, as I said, just had a constructive conversation with the Israeli President yesterday. We will do everything we can to support the Victorian Police to bring those perpetrators to justice. Thanks everyone.