Andrew Laming (Bowman, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

This debate is about people living in the bush. It is about the practitioners and providers that deliver world-class health services to one of the most sparsely populated places on the planet. If you are in this chamber, on either side, I know that you fundamentally support the great work that they do. But I will tell you one thing about people from the bush—they know bulldust when they see it. They know talking-point ping-pong when they see it. And I will tell you what they want—they want us, down here in Canberra, fully focused and fully committed to better services in the bush.

In the six years of Labor government there was plenty of money spent but not a lot of change on the ground. We have come to government with a very different focus, and that is to listen to the people on the ground. We will listen to the rural doctors; we will listen to the rural health agencies that were here even last week—the rural health networks that tell us what people in the bush want.

As we have one of the truly sparse places on earth, with the finest health system in the world, we need to listen to the rural doctors and ask them how they do it, and we need to make their jobs easier. Nothing is achieved by screaming at each other down here in Canberra. The rural doctors have released Think rural, with 10 recommendations. I will run through them very quickly. The first of them is to sort out training for interns, registrars, house officers and medical students, and make sure that we provision for them. The coalition have put in $40 million over four years to get those internships funded, when the Labor government over the last six years simply dithered at the challenge.

We need specific ways of identifying the truly committed and impassioned health clinicians who want to be rural docs. We need to identify them early and get them started. And we need an advanced rural training pathway, acknowledging that the job of a doctor in the bush is completely different to the job of an urban doctor. They do a completely different job, as many overseas trained doctors learn to their chagrin. We need to have a specific training pathway for them.

We need to know that overseas trained doctors, who have committed to this beautiful country and have moved to one of the most remote parts here and set up practice, can have their kids going to a state school, that they still get coverage under Medicare and that we will look after these new citizens and respect them as equals, as they have been adjudged by the Medical Council. Because they are just that—they are the backbone of rural health service provision in so many areas where we cannot get an Aussie trained doctor to work.

We need to have the infrastructure. The general practitioners in the bush will tell you that they have nowhere to accommodate the medical students. That is why we need to have practice incentives—$238 million over four years—that partners do that with the $52 million of coalition money matching, dollar for dollar, the commitments by rural practices. No, we are not having pop-up superclinics around the country right next door to existing general practice. We are doing it where general practices put in 50 per cent of the amount.

Lastly, we want to see some recognition of incentives to go bush. If someone commits to working out in Camooweal they deserve a little bit more than someone who lives on the Queensland coast. We need to recognise those GPs who invest their lives in the bush.

I just want to say thank you to the docs who head out there and do that great work, and thank you to the nurses, who know their towns backwards. I want to say thank you to the allied health practitioners, who drive hundreds of kilometres every week delivering their expertise to communities that cannot support a single professional with their skills. I want to thank those who take out private health cover, who fund the system that builds the hospitals of the future. Thank you to the half of the Australian population, who, because they can pay for their private health, do just that. I want to say to CEO Gordon Gregory and Chair Tim Kelly from the National Rural Health Alliance: thank you for coming down here and giving us your views, not just on the future of Primary Health Networks, which you understand can do the job, but also on the importance of an adequate NBN so that these practices can do their job—they can work in telehealth so that the education reforms that we are proposing will release more, not fewer, highly qualified health providers to the bush.

I know that they are fully committed to dental services being delivered, and they are committed to seeing them delivered by private dentists. We know that 98 per cent of dentists work in the private sector, and no matter how much those on the other side of the chamber have an aversion to private services, if you do not have private dentists on board it ain't gonna happen.

I thank the National Rural Health Alliance for putting their views so clearly. We could do far better spending this time in the chamber listening to those expert bodies, listening to Jenny Johnson and Dr Paul Mara from the Rural Doctors Association, because they are on the ground, looking after the local people. They know that those communities will support a small copayments to keep the health system running effectively. They know that the compassion of doctors is such that those who cannot afford to pay a copayment will never be asked to do so.

See this speech in context