A look back at the biggest headlines, investigations and gaffes to grace our pages this year.
As we crawl through the last remaining days of 2025, the whole team at The Medical Republic wanted to thank you – our readers – for yet another stellar year here in the primary care news sphere.
We’re endlessly grateful for each and every one of you who has taken the time to read, comment on or share our stories this year.
And what a year of stories it has been!
From a Medicare perspective, the year started with a bang when Labor announced an $8.5 billion reform package back in February.
Our reporters had the story out within an hour of the original news flash, and we’ve been right with you through the initial apprehension over the 90% bulk billing target, the confusion over how the new PIP would be split and the aftermath of the 1 November implementation.
Outside of the big, big PIP and expanded bulk-billing incentives, the other notable changes to Medicare this year were in chronic disease management.
The old suite of items, which set one fee for writing a chronic disease plan and one fee for a plan review, have been overhauled. Reviews now have the same rebate as the writing of a plan.
Mark Butler has well and truly returned for his second term as federal health minister, and while it’s still (relatively) early days, he does appear to have shifted focus from listening to acting.
In its first term, the Albanese government initiated, consulted on or published more than 70 reviews.
All this talk has left the sector itching for real reform.
As Department of Health, Disability and Ageing secretary Blair Comley wrote in his incoming government briefing: “‘even more doing, less reviewing’ would be a good mindset for this term”.
Within the health portfolio, the 2022 Strengthening Medicare Review begat five spinoff reviews: scope of practice, working better for Medicare, incentives, after hours and international medical graduates.
As it stands at the end of the 2025, more than half of the 2022 Strengthening Medicare initiatives have been implemented, but most are still awaiting review.
In terms of institutions, the RACGP and ACRRM found themselves in hot water in July, when TMR broke the story of a pesky clause in the draft GP training grant from the Commonwealth which would force colleges to prioritise universal bulk-billing practices for registrar placement.
The AMA did not escape 2025 unscathed either, with the AMA Queensland unceremoniously announcing its impending departure from the federation earlier this month.
But it was the RACP which took the cake for what us Gen Z reporters call a “public crashout”.
In August, the college’s board made the extraordinary move of passing a vote of no confidence in the president-elect.
Several Extraordinary General Meetings later, president-elect Dr Sharmila Chandran remains in her position, while outgoing president Professor Jennifer Martin also remains in her role.
Dr Chandran has filed a Fair Work action against the college, which is still ongoing.
As editor, I’d like to formally shout out our reporter Euan Kielly for coming up with what I believe was our best headline of the year: The C in RACP stands for ‘coup’.
No year is ever complete without its fair share of gaffes, and we do have to give it to AHPRA for its clumsily handled telehealth update.
In October, AHPRA managed to put out a press release implying that the regulator only considered telehealth to be acceptable in situations where the prescriber and patient had an established, in-person relationship.
The document that the press release referred to, however, said nothing of the kind.
It turned out that there had been a mistake in the press release, which was eventually amended – but not before several days of confusion.
On the topic of gaffes, it would be remiss not to mention one of our own; a mishearing of a departmental official at a conference in May led us to mistakenly believe that the Department of Health, Disability and Ageing were referring to the Bulk Billing Practice Incentive Program as ‘the Big, Big, PIP’.
While an entertaining thought, it turns out that the boffins at DoHDA simply call it the BB PIP like the rest of us.
Related
Having now covered the politics of the primary healthcare sector for close to five years, I know it is folly to try and predict what 2026 will bring.
However, if I did chance to look into my crystal ball, I would wager that the next year includes the following:
- Steps toward harmonising the state-based drug and territory poisons acts, which will in turn allow the Commonwealth to have a bigger hand in nationalising extended scope of practice. This will likely come with mixed results for general practice. On one hand, it may allow all GPs to diagnose and prescribe for ADHD. On the other, it could also entrench pharmacist-led prescribing for a range of conditions.
- Continued growth in the GP bulk-billing rate also appears inevitable, at least in the short term. While there may not be a tidal wave of practices signing up to the BB PIP, the extended triple bulk-billing incentive will likely induce more mixed-billing practices to go back to bulk billing the patients they were charging smaller out-of-pocket fees.
- A shift away from public scrutiny of GP gap fees to focus on non-GP specialist fees. This is an issue which has been bubbling away for many years, but Mr Butler has strongly hinted over previous weeks that he plans to start looking outside the box to tackle high non-GP specialist costs. It’s likely that a move to, say, force all non-GP specialist doctors to use the Medical Costs Finder website or to cap their fees, will come with a government-produced campaign highlighting those fees.
TMR will return with daily newsletters from the week beginning 12 January, 2026.
Until then, we have some intermittent newsletters highlighting the best coverage of 2025.
Happy holidays, and thank you for reading.
