Victorian election GP platform: payroll tax, Chemist Care Now, MATOD

The 28 November Victorian state election is five weeks away, and the issues that have been building in general practice for years are now on the election agenda. RACGP Victoria and AMA Victoria are hosting a pre-election health debate on 31 October at RACGP East Melbourne, with representatives from Labor, the Coalition, the Greens, and One Nation. The confirmed speakers are Victorian Health Minister Ingrid Stitt (Labor), Shadow Health Minister Georgie Crozier (Coalition), Dr Sarah Mansfield (Greens), and Colleen Harkin (One Nation).

That is a meaningful gathering. Victorian health debates have not always centred general practice. The fact that the RACGP and AMA are jointly convening and that all major parties have confirmed attendance suggests the college has enough political traction to make this a conversation parties need to be seen participating in.

The five asks on RACGP Victoria’s pre-election platform are not abstract. Each addresses a specific, documented gap that shows up in GP workload or practice viability. They are worth unpacking.

Payroll tax: the one with a current promise

The Victorian Coalition has committed to exempting Victorian GPs from payroll tax if elected. RACGP Victoria has welcomed this and explicitly called on other parties to match it.

Payroll tax exposure for general practices has been a live pressure since 2023–24, when state revenue authorities across several jurisdictions issued reassessments treating GP service fees as wages for payroll tax purposes. Victorian practices are among those affected. The financial exposure per practice is significant — in some cases, retrospective assessments covering several years. A legislative exemption would remove the ongoing liability and reduce a key cost pressure that has pushed some practices toward higher gap fees or closure.

That the Coalition has committed and other parties have not yet is worth watching. A debate between all major parties on a platform where payroll tax exemption is the clearest point of differentiation gives the question more political salience than it would otherwise have in a general health debate.

Chemist Care Now: the safety argument

RACGP Victoria’s concern about the Chemist Care Now program is that it operates without an adequate evidence base on safety and quality. RACGP Victoria Chair Dr Anita Muñoz has been direct about this: independent pharmacy prescribing in Victoria is not evidence-based, and the college has significant concerns about patient safety.

The ask is not for the program to be scrapped. It is for a full independent evaluation before the program continues or expands. That is a measured position — it acknowledges that pharmacy access has a role to play in reducing pressure on general practice, while arguing that evidence should precede expansion.

This is worth watching for GPs nationally, not just in Victoria. Independent pharmacy prescribing pilots are operating in multiple jurisdictions. The evidentiary questions RACGP Victoria is raising — whether conditions are being managed safely without access to full clinical history, whether there are appropriate referral and escalation pathways, whether outcomes data is being collected — are the same questions that will need to be answered anywhere the model expands.

MATOD: the workforce constraint that costs lives

Medication-assisted treatment of opioid dependence — buprenorphine or methadone prescribed by an authorised practitioner in a community setting — reduces overdose deaths, hospital presentations, and transmission of blood-borne viruses. The evidence for community MATOD as a cost-effective intervention is not contested.

What is constrained is workforce. Not enough GPs have MATOD authorisation, and of those who do, not all are actively prescribing. The training required is not trivial, and community MATOD patients can be complex and time-consuming. Without financial incentives, the GP who completes the training and then finds that the economics of community MATOD work against their practice is making a rational decision in a broken system.

RACGP Victoria’s ask is a stipend for GPs who complete MATOD training and for specific mechanisms to encourage trained GPs into community prescribing. These are addressable asks — they are not asking for a new system, just for the financial architecture to make the existing system work for the GPs who are willing to use it.

Reinstate the Chief GP Adviser

The Office of the Chief GP Adviser was defunded. RACGP Victoria’s ask to reinstate it is a governance argument as much as a funding one. Having a senior, clinician-level general practice voice inside government affects which questions get asked when policies affecting general practice are being designed. When that role is absent, the policy gets made without it.

Children in out-of-home care

Free medicines for children in out-of-home care, and recognition of cuts to foster carer funding, are the asks that speak most directly to health equity. Children in out-of-home care have significantly higher rates of physical and mental health conditions and significantly lower rates of consistent healthcare. Cost barriers to medicines — even small ones — compound the access problems this cohort already faces.

2 cents: what GPs in Victoria can do

The debate is on 31 October at 1.30 pm AEDT at RACGP East Melbourne. If you are a Victorian GP and want to submit a question, the debate is taking questions from multiple stakeholders — RACGP Victoria is the point of contact.

For GPs outside Victoria: the asks on this platform — payroll tax exemption, pharmacy prescribing evidence standards, MATOD workforce incentives — are not exclusively Victorian concerns. Each of these will come up in every state where these pressures exist, which is most of them. The debate in Victoria is a preview of the arguments that will need to be made elsewhere.

Verdict: yes — the RACGP Victoria pre-election platform puts five specific, addressable asks to parties who have confirmed attendance. The payroll tax commitment from the Coalition is the first concrete partisan differentiation; the others are live tests of whether general practice policy can be made on evidence.

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Sources cited

1. General practice the focus of Victoria health debate — RACGP newsGP, 28 October 2026
2. RACGP Victoria pre-election health position — RACGP Victoria, October 2026