Pauline Hanson is riding high in the polls, even beating out Anthony Albanese as the preferred prime minister in the latest Resolve Political Monitor. People are angry about the cost of living, and healthcare is a massive part of that anxiety. It's easy to see why One Nation's promises to cut waste and put Australians first sound attractive on a bumper sticker. But when you look closely at the party's actual healthcare platform, the math completely falls apart.
Public policy experts are sounding the alarm. Instead of saving billions, One Nation’s health policies are built on basic administrative errors that would actually blow a massive hole in the federal budget. Even worse, they risk locking vulnerable Australians out of the medical care they need. For an alternative view, check out: this related article.
The Myth of the Three Billion Dollar Medicare Fraud
The centerpiece of One Nation’s healthcare crackdown is a plan to force photo identification onto Medicare cards. Hanson claims this will wipe out up to $3 billion lost annually to "fraudulent claims and misuse."
It sounds like a common-sense fix. We use photo ID for everything else, right? But the $3 billion figure is a total misdirection. Peter Breadon, the health program director at the Grattan Institute, points out that this specific estimate of health system leakage has virtually nothing to do with everyday consumer identity fraud. Similar insight on the subject has been shared by BBC News.
"There's not much evidence that consumer fraud for Medicare cards is a meaningful cost to government," Breadon says.
Think about how Medicare actually works. The real leakages in the system happen through complex billing errors, corporate overcharging, or chronic over-servicing by a tiny minority of providers. A photo of your face on a plastic card won't stop a corporate medical clinic from miscoding a consultation fee.
What it will do is create an administrative nightmare. Issuing photo-verified cards to over 26 million people means building a massive bureaucratic vetting apparatus. The cost to implement this would easily outstrip any tiny savings gathered from stopping people from borrowing a cousin's card for a GP visit. For vulnerable communities—homeless Australians, people fleeing domestic violence, or those living in remote Indigenous communities who lack easy access to licensing centers—this policy simply creates a dangerous barrier to seeing a doctor.
Axing the TGA is an Under the Hood Blunder
One Nation has also pledged to completely scrap Australia's medicines regulator, the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA). The plan is to roll its "essential functions" directly into the federal Department of Health.
There is just one glaring problem. The TGA is already a division of the federal Department of Health.
This isn't just a minor technicality; it betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of how the Australian government works. The TGA operates within the department but relies on a specific self-funding mechanism.
| Regulatory Funding Model | Taxpayer Burden | Who Actually Pays? |
|---|---|---|
| One Nation Proposal | High | Australian Taxpayers |
| Current TGA Model | Minimal | Global Pharmaceutical Companies (via Cost-Recovery Fees) |
Scrapping the TGA to merge it into the wider bureaucracy won't save a single cent. It disrupts a highly specialized body that evaluates whether a new cancer drug or pacemaker is safe to enter the Australian market. When the United States temporarily disrupted its global health entanglements under previous populist leadership, the government ended up spending vastly more money trying to replicate those lost administrative and oversight functions.
Re-evaluating the Pandemic Medicine Cabinet
Hanson’s platform heavily leans into lingering pandemic grievances. Alongside a push for a royal commission into pandemic management and strict opposition to vaccine mandates, One Nation wants to "review" $3bn in medications approved for the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (PBS) during the pandemic.
Reviewing public spending is fine in theory. But threatening to claw back or restrict access to life-saving medications approved over the last few years hits patients directly in the wallet. Federal Health Minister Mark Butler has been quick to weaponize this, labeling One Nation a direct "risk to Medicare and cheaper medicines."
The timing is incredibly volatile. Right now, everyday Australians are already skipping scripts because specialist fees are soaring and the safety net is stretched to its limit. Threatening the stability of the PBS injects chaos into an industry where global pharmaceutical companies are already pulling complex drugs out of the Australian market due to regulatory delays and strict pricing caps.
The Real Cost of Walking Away From Global Health
The final piece of the populist health puzzle is One Nation's vow to withdraw Australia from the United Nations and the World Health Organization (WHO), claiming it will save the country up to $1 billion a year.
It's a classic isolationist pitch, but diseases don't care about borders. Public health experts warn that pulling out of global surveillance networks leaves Australia completely blind to the next mutated influenza strain or viral outbreak. When you isolate your medical community from international data sharing, you don't save money. You just spend ten times more trying to build an insular defense system from scratch.
Anger at the current state of Australian healthcare is entirely justified. Wait times are unacceptable, bulk-billing is dying, and regional hospitals are chronically understaffed. But demanding photo IDs on Medicare cards and axing an agency that is already inside the health department won't fix a single waiting list. It just makes the system more expensive, more bureaucratic, and harder to navigate.
If you want to protect your healthcare access, call your local MP and demand real structural reform on GP bulk-billing incentives and specialist out-of-pocket fees. Don't fall for administrative errors wrapped up as populist solutions.
