If you are wondering what happened to the national roll-out of real-time prescription monitoring, Minister for Health Greg Hunt says blame the states.

The introduction of a national tracking system to tackle the deaths and health harms of the opioid epidemic has become one of the longest unimplemented policy initiatives in Australian healthcare — with the first federal reform pledge dating back to 2012.

Five years later, Mr Hunt declared the government would build “a nationally consistent, mandated system for real-time monitoring of controlled drugs”, at a cost of $16 million.

However, it subsequently became clear it would only build a “national data exchange” to collate prescription reports from state- and territory-based real-time monitoring systems, which, outside Tasmania, were non-existent.