JENI O’DOWD: Convicted murderer Alicia Schiller approved to receive taxpayer-funded Ozempic in prison

Has the world gone mad? In Victoria, the Government is paying for a convicted murderer’s lollies. Then it is paying for the drug that undoes them.

Alicia Schiller is serving 16 years for killing her housemate, Tyrelle Evertsen-Mostert, in a drug-fuelled rage in Geelong in 2014.

Evertsen-Mostert was 31. She was a mother of three. Schiller has now been approved to receive taxpayer-funded Ozempic behind bars and surgery to remove excess skin from her upper eyelids.

The stated problem behind the first is that she has been overeating. On lollies, chips and chocolate. Bought, it should be said, at a prison canteen run by the State.

Ozempic is subsidised for one thing: type 2 diabetes. Whether that is why Schiller is on it, nobody has said.

I know the outrage this generates because talkback radio ran it hard within hours of the story breaking. 2GB’s Ben Fordham called them free fat jabs. Brad Battin, the Opposition’s police and corrections spokesman, asked why a convicted killer who chooses to overeat should get access to Ozempic.

“I’d struggle to find the argument to say it’s OK,” he told 3AW.

“For Ozempic, if you’ve got diabetes … and medical reasons, then we shouldn’t get involved in that. But for choice, if you could just take some of the lollies out of her cell, as the article says, and give her a good dose of exercise, maybe that would be a better outcome for her and the community.

“And as far as elective surgery, if you’re in prison, you should be just put on the elective surgery list. Why do you get pushed up the chain when you’re in jail?”

The actual scandal is not that Alicia Schiller is getting a weight-loss drug. It is that she is getting it faster and cheaper than almost anyone else in the country.

Nearly half a million Australians are using GLP-1 medications.

Federal Health Minister Mark Butler has said more than 400,000 people are paying market prices from $4000 to $5000 a year, with many paying between $200 and $600 a month. That is a mortgage payment. Or school fees. Or a weekly supermarket shop.

Weight-loss drugs are not subsidised in Australia, apart from GLP-1s prescribed for type 2 diabetes.

This is despite what the drugs have been shown to do beyond the weight itself.

Losing the weight staves off diabetes later, yes. But trials have also found semaglutide can cut major cardiovascular events by 20 per cent in people who are overweight or obese and already have heart disease, and have no diabetes at all.

There is also evidence on kidney disease progression, sleep apnoea and blood pressure, which is presumably what Butler meant in January when he called the GLP-1s an extraordinary class of drugs, not just for weight loss but for a range of other health benefits.

So, despite what much of the media writes, this is not a celebrity quick-fix weight-loss drug. It may have started out that way, but it certainly isn’t anymore.

Back to Alicia Schiller. Prisoners are entitled to health care, and if Schiller’s weight is a genuine clinical risk, it should be treated. But she seems to be at the front of the queue for free jabs while her diet is not monitored.

We have watched Schiller find a soft edge in the system before.

In 2024, she won approval to access IVF from prison, arguing a Supreme Court precedent.

She withdrew the application only after her own mother refused, and after Victorian IVF clinics declined to take her on.

Read that again. The system said yes. Her mother said no. The clinics said no. The only thing standing between a woman who took a mother from three children and the chance to become one herself was the private conscience of people who were not obliged to intervene.

That is not a system with a principle. That is a system with a gap, and Schiller has now found it twice.

Which brings us to the part that should actually worry you, and it has nothing to do with one woman in one Victorian prison.

Australia has already written the rule for GLP-1s. It is savage, and almost nobody has noticed.

Last year, the Pharmaceutical Benefits Advisory Committee recommended that Wegovy be subsidised.

Not for obesity. But for someone with an established cardiovascular disease, which means you have already had a heart attack, a stroke, or symptomatic peripheral arterial disease, and on top of that a BMI of 35 or more, or 32.5 if you are Asian, Aboriginal or a Torres Strait Islander.

In other words, you have to have already had the event the drug exists to prevent.

Prevention was considered and rejected, and the PBS committee was honest about why.

It said the drug would be useful for prevention, but that at current prices, the country cannot afford it.

But we can, it seems, afford a health system buckling under costs that will only worsen as the population ages, one that funds the ambulance, the stent and the ward, but not the injection that keeps you from all three.

The committee listed the priority groups: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander patients with obesity-related co-morbidities, people with syndromic obesity, people whose obesity was caused by their medication and people who need to lose weight before a surgeon will operate on them at all.

Every one of those groups was identified as a priority. Not one of them was subsidised.

Eight months after the recommendation, Wegovy, Ozempic’s weight-loss sibling, is still not on the PBS. The medicine status page said so as recently as the first of this month, while half a million people pay top dollar to be healthy.

Schiller did not have to have a heart attack first. She did not have to hit 35 on a chart, or wait eight months, or ring around for a private script, or find $5000 she did not have.

I don’t want anyone denied medical care. But I do want to know why the shortest path in this country to a drug that so many people are queuing and paying for is given so easily to a woman serving a 16-year sentence for murder.