It is quite clear that the government has failed to grasp the opportunity of pursuing funding and support for interstate patients needing dialysis in Alice Springs. As the minister articulated, the Commonwealth on 6 November said that they would be providing a transportable dialysis facility, to be placed in Alice Springs on a temporary basis until the new unit is in place in April-although it looks like that will not be available until June. That facility, apparently, is not going to accept new interstate patients.

The Australian Greens believe the need for dialysis services in Alice Springs is a matter of extreme urgency and warrants debate here today. We are currently facing a crisis in Central Australia regarding the provision of healthcare services and support for Aboriginal patients requiring renal dialysis. The Northern Territory government has recently announced that, effectively, it is closing its borders to new interstate dialysis patients from the border regions of South Australia and Western Australia, my home state. New patients seeking these services are being turned away because of a serious shortfall in dialysis places, sometimes called ‘beds' or ‘seats' in Alice Springs. The Alice Springs renal dialysis unit, the RDU, with 26 dialysis stations, is currently the largest in the Southern Hemisphere, but it is currently 20 per cent over capacity. A new $16.7 million, 12-station renal unit is under construction and is due to open in April 2010-although the latest news is that this date may have been pushed out to June this year or even beyond.

I can assure the Senate that the Greens are keen to have a vote on both of these motions, so I will try and sum up and conclude this debate as quickly as possible. I point out that although the government just outlined that $6 million will be spent-from 2001, I think they said-scientists estimate that expenditure of around $10 million per year is required. So the expenditure the government is committing is way below what is needed to address this threat. I articulated during our previous discussion on this motion the impact that phytophthora is having. Scientists consider that it should be listed as one of our top three threatening processes in Australia. I have articulated that it is not just a Western Australian problem; it is also a South Australian problem, a Tasmanian problem and a Victorian problem-at least; it could be spreading to other areas. In concluding this debate I do not want to reiterate what I said previously, but I would like to go to specific arguments that the government raised around what happens if they disallow this and around the threat abatement plan.

I rise to make a contribution in this second reading debate on the Health Insurance Amendment (Revival of Table Items) Bill 2009. The Greens have struggled with this issue. We will be supporting this bill because-as we have highlighted on other occasions in the chamber and in fact when the Greens made a contribution to the debate over the extended Medicare safety net-we are concerned about the issues around the rebates. We think that patients are being caught in the middle of a failure to resolve this issue. The government and, to our mind, many ophthalmologists have not engaged in a meaningful debate over the excessive costs that are being charged in some areas. There is no doubt that technology has decreased the amount of time that is required to do fairly standard operations; there is no doubt that some more complex operations require further time; and there is no doubt that some ophthalmologists are churning a number of patients through their operation in a single day. That has increased the rate and has led to the need for the government to start to look at issues around the rebates.