Anthony Albanese is still in Melbourne (obviously) where he is holding his second press conference of the day – but this is the campaign press conference. So it is at a pharmacy.

The main announcement is about adding a couple of new medications to the PBS, but the underlying announcement is ‘we love the PBS and won’t be bending on it so suck on that Trump’ but with much more polite, diplomatic language (curse civility politics).

Mark Butler is also there:

This medication the Prime Minister mentioned for kids with glaucoma and also I’m particularly excited about the listing of this drug for bone marrow cancer, a discovery made here in Melbourne at 20 years ago which is now taking the world by storm.

It has been listed for treatment in the US through the FDA and this week it is added to the PBS here in Australia. 1900 patients a year who would otherwise be paying $70,000 on the private market for this life changing, life-saving treatment for this rare form of bone marrow cancer.

That is why we have defended the PBS so hard. We did it 20 years ago in the parliament when the US big Pharma industry tried to get concessions on our PBS under the negotiation of the US free trade agreement. It was Labor that insisted on amendments in Parliament that were resisted and opposed by the US trade representative at the time and opposed by John Howard, who opposed our amendments to secure the PBS pricing arrangements in Parliament right up until the last minute of the parliamentary debate and again, the Prime Minister, the Foreign Minister have made it clear we will never ever negotiate about the PBS. It is delivered Australians such good health outcomes, great cost measure for decades and we absolutely are confident we can do that for decades to come.