Ewen Jones (Herbert, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Could I just ask the member for Wills a question? He quoted at length—for about 11 minutes—in his speech stories from the nurses' federation about the role of nurses and where we were going and all that sort of stuff; what did Health Workforce Australia do about it? Isn't that what they were supposed to be doing? The member went through this whole account of what Health Workforce Australia is; he spent nearly three minutes on Health Workforce Australia in his speech. But isn't that what they were supposed to be doing? Wouldn't that be a core responsibility for Health Workforce Australia? Isn't that what we should be talking about here? Isn't that the role of the department?

I would like to back up the member for Moreton. No-one is saying that Health Workforce Australia has not done a good job. No-one is saying that they all deserve to be sacked; no-one is saying that at all. What we are saying is that their work has finished. Their plan was for four years. Their strategies were to:

I just do not see what that work has done.

I want to make a couple of real points here. There was a four-year agreement that all Australian governments were to provide funding for Health Workforce Australia; it has expired. However, the states and territories have not contributed any of the agreed funding. So, once again, you have a Labor federal government making decisions for other levels of government which are never going to be supported. Right from the get-go, this thing has fallen over—it has fallen at the very first hurdle. The Commonwealth government has been the sole funder of Health Workforce Australia, committing $1.05 billion since its establishment. Where is the money from the states? This is all supposed to be under the National Partnership Agreement on Hospital and Health Workforce Reform. This was supposed to be an agreement between the states and the federal government. When they said, 'Are we all going to put in?' it was, 'Yeah!' So they all signed up. But no money was ever put in from the states. So where does the actual agreement come from?

What we are doing with the Health Workforce Australia (Abolition) Bill 2014 is streamlining the delivery of health workforce policy and programs through removing unnecessary levels of administration and bureaucracy. We could not have been clearer about what we were trying to do when we talked about our overall strategy on health. The Minister for Health, who is sitting at the table, was very clear in all my conversations with him, and in all he said in the press. Our philosophy was about getting the goods to the customer, and about removing the number of hands through which the goods had to pass before they got there, because at every stage along the way you lose some money—the more levels of bureaucracy you put between the source and the recipient, the less money gets to the recipient. It is just like farm produce: the product goes from the farm gate, through a wholesaler to a retailer, and the more hands the product goes through, in going from the farm to the end-user, the more expensive that product will be. So it makes perfect sense to me that, if we can cut down the levels of bureaucracy and the numbers of people who are standing in the way of getting our health dollars to our people—to the people in the community, the people we are supposed to be helping—then the better off we will be.

This government has committed to doubling the Practice Incentives Program, or PIP, Teaching Payment from $100 to $200 for each three-hour training session provided to a medical student. Can I just tell you a story to show what we are trying to do in this country and what is actually happening out there? It feeds into what we are trying to do here.

I have a good friend in Townsville and he had a doctor from the Congo who was doing training with him. A 64-year-old man came in to see them and he presented with pneumonia. The doctor from the Congo, who was being supervised by my friend the Australian doctor, gave this man some Panadol and was going to send him home. My friend stopped him at the door and said to the doctor, 'Why did you do that?' And the doctor said, 'Well, he's 64 years old and he's got pneumonia; he's going to die. I'm sending him home.' My friend said, 'Not in Australia, mate; not in Australia.' So what we have to do is to make sure that we get our doctors and GPs to be able to understand exactly what is required to be a GP here. We need to be able to pick up on those things.

I think most of us here who have a good relationship with our GP will understand just what role they play in our lives. I know that when I go to my GP she can tell from the first time she looks at me how much trouble she will find I am in when I get into the room. This is what a good GP will do for you. So if we can do anything to assist GP practices, and if we can do anything to assist people who provide primary health care, that is what we should do. We do not assist primary health care by establishing another building in another city or another capital city around Australia to rake out these sorts of things.

I do not want to sound flippant, but there were 21 agencies developed by the previous government. It is sort of like that scene from Yes, Minister with the hospital with no patients: 'But the hospital has won prizes for its efficiency!' And Hacker says, 'But there are no patients!' The reply is, 'The patients would ruin it!' The patients ruin the health system. It is like 'education is wasted on the young', but they are the necessary part of it. That is why we are there! And that is why the work of Health Workforce Australia has been completed and it should be rolled up.

The previous government just had a problem with letting go. As the member for Bowen has reminded us, they did do some very good work but when you start to self-perpetuate to try to find out what you are trying to do and what you stand for, and if you give people such a wide brief that they no longer actually produce anything of significance, you have to wonder why they are still being funded. I believe that the Labor Party would say, 'We are going to employ someone to build your house. But when the house is built we still want to keep that bloke on, because we don't want him to lose his job. So we should just keep on funding him all the way through. It is that sort of thing that we just have to do.' Sooner or later the job is done.

This government is also investing $40 million in up to 100 additional medical internships each year in non-traditional settings, including private hospitals in regional areas. Townsville is the perfect example of this. We have a number of full-fee-paying doctors who have come through their training at universities throughout Australia who otherwise would have been cast to the wood heap if it were not for the health minister of Australia at the time, Peter Dutton—sitting at the table here today—saying that we cannot let this happen.

So we had all these interns taken into the Mater Hospital Pimlico in Townsville and put to work there. They are predominantly overseas students but educated in Australia. I will 'sort of' quote the Minister for Health when he said, 'Look, we understand that your parents and your country have supported you to be here and we can't really come out and say that we want you to stay in Australia. But, gees, it would be handy if you all met a partner here, settle down in Townsville and became members of our society—never went home, got citizenship and stayed here for ever.' Those are the sorts of things that we must do. But this internship is about making sure that we get value for these people in completing their degrees, and making sure that they come out as good a doctor as we can possibly handle.

This government has also committed to provide up to 175 grants for rural and remote general practices to expand facilities to support teaching and training of medical students and registrars. The grants of up to $300,000 will be provided to successful applicants and require a matched contribution from the practice. In Townsville we have a GP Super Clinic which was promised in 2007, promised in 2010 and was actually built—it has the signs up, has the car park marked out, has the beautiful frosted glass and everything—but still not opened, seven years after being promised. Not one thing—$6 million down the gurgler with nothing happening. And they built that thing less than 800 metres away from an existing GP practice.

The GP around the corner had to pay for his own facility. The physio across the road from the GP had to pay for his own facility. He carries that loan, but the GP Super Clinic that the federal government brought in, ostensibly to take the pressure off the emergency department—but this one will only be open from seven in the morning until nine at night—was never going to bulk-bill anyone, even when bulk-billing was the course de rigueur. That is not going to take the pressure off the emergency department. So this thing was an abject failure from day one and should never have progressed beyond that. But the previous government could not let itself get away with that and just kept on pouring money in, in direct competition with someone around the corner who has a mortgage and loans in trying to make a business run. What we will do is to enhance the practice that is there dollar for dollar and to enhance the medical training facilities.

The government will also, significantly, expand the number of GP training places. GP training places will increase by 300—from 1,200 to 1,500 new places in 2015. The significant increase in GP training places will create more vocational training opportunities for this workforce, freeing up more junior doctor training positions for new graduates coming through. The Australian General Practice Training program, which the government's commitment will expand, has a distribution target that requires 50 per cent of training to occur in rural and remote locations.

James Cook University in my city of Townsville had a medical school established under the prime ministership of John Howard. That was one of the greatest achievements of Peter Lindsay, the former member for my seat. And they are turning out doctors who work as registrars all around Northern and regional Australia. We are trying to work on programs where we can do the New Colombo Plan, where people can actually do some training and placements in places like Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands and out to Fiji. We should be able to do those things. That is why making the decisions as close as possible to the student and to the client will actually happen.

In the time I have left I would like to address a couple of things in relation to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health. Obviously, this is a concern for everyone in this House and everyone in this House takes a great deal of interest in relation to our first Australians. It is of great concern to me, being from a regional area, that we do see a lot of Indigenous people in hospital. If you walk through The Townsville Hospital, the number of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders is absolutely shocking. This overrepresentation is a cause for great concern.

Of course, Townsville is a regional centre so we do have people flying in for treatment. But the number of Aboriginal and Islander people in the hospital at any one time just beggars belief. There is something going seriously wrong out there, and it comes down to education; it comes down to example and education.

I have Palm Island in my electorate, where domestic violence is a massive issue. It is a massive issue all throughout the Pacific. In my electorate we have domestic violence and major health issues, but it comes down to access to the clinician and access to education and example.

We have Matthew Bowen in North Queensland—probably the greatest full-back of all time. He is currently overseas for a couple of years with Wigan. I can tell you one story about Matthew Bowen. On his first trip away he scored a try for the Cowboys. They gave him a can of beer and they said, 'Congratulations!' He took a mouthful out of it and said, 'I don't know how you can drink this stuff!' and poured it out. He is a father of two kids and he has a partner, Rudie. He is a great family member and still loves going home to Hopevale. His mum is a teachers' aide.

I would love to see Matthew Bowen go around and talk to the kids about the choices he made to get there. More than that, I would love to see someone like his mum, who still works as a teacher's aide at the Hopevale State School, sit down and talk to parents about the choices and decisions she made to make sure that Matthew Bowen was given the opportunity and given the diet that actually mattered for him to come through as the person he did. We can do those things that are so close to the ground, which will cost so little money, but which will yield actual tangible results for someone that we actually know. More than that, a parent should know that giving a child a can of Fanta at six o'clock in the morning may keep them quiet for a little while but is not good for them. We must address this issue because they are dying too quickly and too soon.

People like Michael Gleadow of Connect'n'Grow, who had nothing to do with Workforce Australia, has come up with a program of taking healthcare workers into schools such as Abergowrie College and Shalom Christian College. They have dedicated facilities there to make sure that he is able to get these people to go through training so they know how to take blood pressure, know what the vital signs are, and can do basic health care there. He has a stitch-up with Deakin University so they can become nurse clinicians and health workers. It has become a career path for a lot of people who care about the community.

If we can get those sorts of decisions made at that level by someone who has just come up with an idea and goes and gets some equipment from Catholic Education to go into these places, we get the good result. I thank Health Workforce Australia for what they have done but their time is over. It is time for people on the ground to do what we need to do.

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