Labor’s urgent care clinics not costed by Parliamentary Budget Office, Gallagher reveals

Opposition Leader Anthony Albanese says Labor’s plan to trial Medicare urgent-care clinics has not been costed by the Parliamentary Budget Office, as he originally claimed, but is “informed” by the PBO’s work.

Albanese clarified the matter after his finance spokeswoman Katy Gallagher tweeted overnight that, “for the avoidance of any confusion”, the $135 million policy had not been “formally costed by the PBO”.

Katy Gallagher has contradicted Anthony Albanese on Labor’s costings.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

“All of our policies will be fully costed and fully released,” he told reporters in Sydney after attending a Good Friday liturgy.

Labor’s plan to trial urgent-care clinics across 50 GP clinics and community health centres translates to an average $2.7 million each over four years at each site, to open 14 hours a day, seven days a week.

Albanese said on Wednesday the plan “has been fully costed by the Parliamentary Budget Office ... One of the things I’m being careful to do is all of the policies that we’ve put out are fully costed.”

Gallagher tweeted late on Thursday that, “for the avoidance of any confusion”, the policy had not been “formally costed by the PBO”, although Labor’s estimate that it would cost $135 million over four years was “based on work done by the PBO”.

Albanese has been under pressure over his failure to name the correct unemployment rate and was forced to address Labor’s costings on Good Friday, during what was supposed to be a break from election campaigning.

The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age asked Labor to clarify which of the policies it has announced in the first week of the election campaign – including $2.5 billion for aged care, $5.4 billion for childcare and $31 million for regional mental health – have been costed by the PBO.

A Labor campaign spokesperson declined to answer, saying only that “all of Labor’s policies and costings will be released before the election”.

The independent PBO provides detailed costings of election commitments at the request of political parties.

Former Health Department secretary Stephen Duckett said it did not matter if the PBO had costed the urgent-care clinics, as the cost of trialling them would be “principally driven by expected staffing of each clinic and the number of clinics” and he expected Labor would have modelled the bulk of the spend over two years.

Labor health spokesman Mark Butler on Wednesday said the plan was not to build new clinics, but to “provide resources to existing GP practices, who want to take their practice to the next level ... and use their skills, use their resources, to deliver this enhanced urgent care service.”

While the major parties agreed to suspend major campaign activities on Good Friday, Finance Minister Simon Birmingham seized on Gallagher’s tweet to accuse Albanese of “lying or misleading Australians” about Labor’s costings.

Asked about the Coalition’s costings, Birmingham told Sky the government’s election policies were costed by the Department of Finance and “we will be transparently showing the costings on the finance department process and website as has occurred in previous elections”.

Health Minister Greg Hunt attacked Labor in a statement issued on Thursday night, just hours before the Easter truce was due to begin.

“This is an embarrassing economic and health backflip for Anthony Albanese and his team,” Hunt said.

“Anthony Albanese said this project was fully costed yesterday. He’s either ill-informed, not across the facts, or have they fudged the figures?

“You just can’t trust Labor with health, because you can’t trust them with economic management.”

The Royal Australian College of General Practitioners on Thursday revealed it had not been consulted on the urgent-care clinics, which would operate out of existing GP clinics and Community Health Centres.

Australian Medical Association President Dr Omar Khorshid said the plan was “piecemeal, ill-thought out ideas where they haven’t consulted with general practitioners and emergency doctors”.

AMA vice president Dr Chris Moy likened the plan with the Rudd government’s GP super clinics, which he said were “white elephants and were some of the worst examples of pork barrelling”.

With Angus Thompson

Jacqueline Maley cuts through the noise of the federal election campaign with news, views and expert analysis. Sign up to our Australia Votes 2022 newsletter here.