Andrew Southcott (Boothby, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

In listening to this speech, we get a very clear idea of the opposition's motive here as we listened to a lot more about the National Party and nothing at all about regional health. With the indulgence of the House, I think I might speak on rural and regional health in this MPI. This looks like nothing more than a wedge. It is the sort of thing that Simon Crean used to specialise in.

But let us talk about regional health. Let us compare and contrast. The previous Howard government from the moment it was elected had a strong focus on rural and regional health. There were the John Flynn Scholarships to encourage people from regional backgrounds to go into medicine. There was looking at changing the way universities did their entry criteria so that more people from rural backgrounds would go into a course in medicine. There was the experience in my electorate, for example, of Flinders University which established in the mid-90s a parallel rural curriculum and showed with an evidence base that instead of a teaching hospital you could actually do your training in a rural general practice. This was built on by having university departments of rural health and then from 1998-1999 rural clinical schools. You just have to look at Townsville, and James Cook University where we now have a rurally based clinical school with a reputation for excellence in the area of tropical health where the students are coming, by and large, from a rural and regional background and looking towards a career in rural and regional health. That is the sort of transformation that we have seen. Look at the Prime Minister when he was Minister for Health. He realised that we did have a shortage, a workforce issue, in rural and regional areas. He doubled the numbers of medical students going through and doubled the numbers of nursing students. Then there is in the area of mental health. We expanded the access to mental health through Medicare. We also had a program, the ATAPS program, which meant that people in regional areas were able to access a fund and get access to psychologists and allied mental health services which previously had not been possible.

Compare and contrast that with the approach the Rudd government took. We had a big National Health and Hospital Reform Commission and one of the recommendations that came out of that was activity based funding in public hospitals. Kevin Rudd, Prime Minister, grabbed it—a fantastic thought bubble—saying that we were going to have activity based funding in every public hospital in Australia. Wrong. Big problem. Anyone with any knowledge of health policy understands that activity based funding, while it is a great policy in metropolitan areas and metropolitan hospitals with high workloads, does not work in those rural hospitals which have seasonal fluctuations and much smaller caseloads. Thankfully, the Labor Party did see sense on that and realised that Kevin's thought bubble was not long-lasting.

So when we look at the state of play in Australia right now, we have 18 medical schools and a number of them were opened during the period of the Howard government in regional areas. We have seen the numbers of doctors graduating increase from 1,660 in 2000 to 3,469 in 2010. We see that spending on rural health workforce programs is more than $1 billion. The Abbott government has been in for one year and already they are looking at addressing all of the areas that we need to in rural health. They are looking at increasing the funding for general practitioners who do teaching, through the PIP, and there is a loading for people in rural areas and, instead of having the dopey GP Super Clinic program, actually encouraging in regional areas to increase their infrastructure for teaching with 500 additional scholarships for nursing and allied health students. They are also looking at expanding medical internships in non-traditional areas. We have expanded the numbers of GP training places by 300 for next year—from 1,200 to 1,500.

These are the real and tangible things that are happening. There is no doubt that the health of Australians in rural and regional areas is not as good as in the rest of Australia. There is no doubt that the workforce needs to be better. There is more to be done but we have got a good track record and we are continuing with the job.

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