Andrew Laming (Bowman, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Regional Health Services and Indigenous Health) Share this | Hansard source

This very important debate, brought to this chamber by the efforts of the members for Maranoa and Leichhardt, is an issue that the government has turned a blind eye to over the last three years. Obviously, we have a maldistribution of doctors and the health workforce in this country, and we need a solution rather than internal bickering on the government benches on whether there should be a point of order or not. Let us focus on the patients and the 1,800 doctors that we need in rural areas who are not there at the moment. I should declare a conflict of interest in that I am a member of one of the aforementioned colleges. But there is no doubt that those colleges have to put their hands up, as has been pointed out, and take responsibility for distribution of the health workforce.

You cannot be the nation’s only specialist college and not take an individual, responsible position on equitable provision throughout Australia. Patients with differing clinical severity can walk into a health establishment and be triaged on need and yet when we triage this nation on geographical need there is no-one doing anything more than applying the standard Rudd-Gillard government model of trickle-down economics where we turn the taps on and train a few more GPs then hopefully one day they will find their way out to rural areas.

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