Bob Katter (Kennedy, Katter's Australian Party) Share this | Hansard source

The previous speaker referred to Cloncurry, which, of course, is my home town. It was my father's home town and my grandfather's home town. My father and his two brothers were the three Katter boys; there were three boys in the family. My uncle Norman died from an injury in rugby league. This was before the Second World War. The Qantas plane was in Longreach. If it had been in Cloncurry, they could have flown him out of Cloncurry and straight to Brisbane. But, by the time it came back from Longreach to Cloncurry and then went to Brisbane, he had died. He died as a result of the tyranny of distance.

In a terrible piece of irony, my father, who had cancer, was supposed to go down for an operation, and the airline strike hit. Even though the government supplied Air Force planes to ferry people—after three or four months, I think it was—he stood in the queue. He didn't feel it was his right to jump the queue. So it ended up that he got down for the operation some seven or eight months after he should have, and the cancer had gotten away and he died. So two of the three Katter boys died as a result of the tyranny of distance.

There's a shortage of doctors in the country areas. The previous speaker made mention of the fact that they don't realise the opportunities in country centres. If you drive into Charleville, there's a huge statue to Dr Louis Ariotti, whom people in Charleville and the area considered next to a sainthood. If you drive into Cloncurry, you drive in on Harvey Sutton highway, which is a tribute to the great doctor that lived in our community and saved so many of our lives. I'm sure that they'll have one to Dr Murphy in Longreach in the not-too-distant future! These men were not only leaders who set a wonderful example for their communities; they were great and committed doctors. They didn't just treat you when you came in to be treated; they alleviated your misery and pain and did everything humanly possible to ward off death in these areas.

In the early days of Qantas, there were many lives lost. Whilst they say Qantas has never had an accident—and that's true of the modern Qantas—the original Queensland and Northern Territory Aerial Services, as it then was, had many deaths. But the effort to overcome the tyranny of distance was so great that people took those risks. You can reflect upon the fact that Ernest Henry, the founder of my home town of Cloncurry, found some heavy rocks there when he was prospecting on horseback, and he rode off to Rockhampton to get them assayed because he thought they were very valuable copper. It turned out they were worthless iron ore, and it had taken him seven months to ride to Rockhampton, get the assays done and go back to Cloncurry. That's the tyranny of distance.

My father mentioned on many, many occasions the great Reverend Flynn, who's on one of our banknotes. He brought the mantle of safety to bush with the Royal Flying Doctor Service.

To turn to the present day, for the first time in my life there was no doctor in Julia Creek, there was no doctor in Cardwell and there was no doctor at Mission Beach. Heavens, how could you not find a doctor at Mission Beach! For two years in a row it was voted one of the four most beautiful places on earth. If you go into my offices, as you have on many occasions, Acting Deputy Speaker Vasta—I call them the Mission Beach mafia because most of them come from Mission Beach. You can't get a doctor to go to Mission Beach? There is something seriously wrong out there.

I want to pay very great tribute to my own doctor, Dr Rod Catton, at Innisfail. I want to pay great tribute to Dr Grant Manypenny, who has worked 70- and 80-hour weeks, continuously, in the latter years of his life to provide us with a vital private medical service in Mareeba. You could say, 'You can go to the hospital,' but you can only go to the hospital for emergencies now. Outpatients at hospitals in Queensland have ceased to exist.

The great 'Red Ted' Theodore, the most important person in Australian history—not my words; they're the words of Paul Keating and Malcolm Fraser—introduced the free hospital system in Queensland. For my entire lifetime, until the ALP got elected in 1990, you could walk in off the street, any time of the day or night, even Christmas Day, 24 hours a day and get service in an outpatients department. Outpatients does not formally exist in Queensland. If you want a graphic illustration of that, my now home town of Charters Towers has a huge sign at the outpatients department saying 'Closed'. On the other side of the aisle is the inpatients department, and that is open. Outpatients is closed permanently.

Lisa Fraser is a very young doctor filled with the enthusiasm of youth and gifted with an excellent intellect. Grant Manypenny has been desperately trying to retire. Rod Catton has worked well after the time he should have stopped working, and we pay great tribute to Rod's self-sacrifice. The three of them came to Canberra. They asked for four things and got all four things. I'm still in a state of shock over it. I've never seen anything like it in my life.

The first thing they asked for that day was the writing off of the HECS debt. The second thing they asked for was more money for GPs in private medical centres. The third thing was foreign doctors coming into Queensland. The restrictions were just a little bit too strict in Queensland and they asked for a liberalisation. The federal government put a second body in that could authorise doctors to become GPs in Queensland. So they're three of the four items. I'm having enormous difficulty remembering the fourth item, and I feel very embarrassed that I can't remember it. I'm at a loss to remember what it was.

It was an extraordinary achievement by those three practitioners. They came down at their own expense and lost a lot of money that they would have earned if they'd been up in their own home towns during that period. The time and research they put into those representations was extraordinary.

Quite frankly, there is no answer to this problem. You can give them all the money in the world, every concession in the world that you want to get them, but unless, to become a doctor practising in Queensland, you have to do rural service, nothing short of that is going to overcome this problem. It is a matter of forcing them to do it. You want to become a doctor in Queensland? You have to spend some time in a maybe not so salubrious centre. That was the law in Queensland for as long as we were in government in the state of Queensland—up until 1990, when the ALP took over. They changed that arrangement and now we haven't got doctors. They got rid of the outpatients.

You can spend hundreds of millions of dollars in the state of Queensland or tens of billions of dollars solving the world's planetary problems with respect to the atmosphere and what they call climate change, but people don't realise that there's not enough money to go round. That is something that has never occurred to what we used to call socialist governments. You could hardly call the Queensland government a socialist government—it's anything but.

People don't understand this. They think that the ALP is representing the have-nots. The complete opposite is true. They slither out of a university into a trade union office, where they are given their proper job of answering the telephone—they're not worth anything more than answering the telephone. But in answering the telephone they get to know all the delegates in Queensland and, when positions come up, they get elected to those positions. They are very articulate and slither in their slippery suits from Sydney universities. Of course they become the owners of Australia. The superannuation funds invest $170 billion every year in the Australian economy, so they are the haves; they are the ruling class; they are the ownership class. They are not very nice people.

What has this got to do with doctors? I'm trying to explain that in Queensland you thought that by electing an ALP government you were going to get looked after. Now your outpatients are closed and towns all over Queensland are without any doctors. The whole system is collapsing underneath you, because there's no money being put there. We're too busy saving the planet. I don't know that it's a very significant contribution there either, with the only proposal coming forward in this House and the state parliament in Queensland is putting windmills in the ocean. I don't think any of you would be game to walk into a hotel and say, 'We're going to solve the world's climate problems because we're going to put windmills in the ocean.' Yet you're game to say it in here; you're game to impose that upon us.

It's a choice: you can spend money on your fantasies and things that you think will get you re-elected or you can look after the people. I'm proud to say that, for my entire time in the state parliament in Queensland, you could go to the hospital—24 hours a day every day of the year, including Christmas Day—and be attended to by a doctor and a qualified person and every single town in the Kennedy electorate—and there are 120, but you could argue there are 142, depending on your definition—had a resident doctor. That is not now the case. I don't know how many towns are not being serviced now because the doctors are simply not there.

I had the great honour and privilege of calling the first meeting to try to secure a medical school in Townsville. Seven years later, the committee that was formed that day broke through and got the first medical school. I take some considerable pride and congratulate myself on that wonderful achievement. Kudos was given to my daughter Mary Jane Streeton, as she is now, who had been the secretary to the organisation; to Professor Wronski, who was the driving force at all times; and to Lady Pearl Logan, who was an incredible woman—I think the greatest woman of the last century in Australia. She was a lady, a knight of the realm, and had an honorary doctorate from the university. Every day of her life she used to take out her Gospels and read to us. She was a very deeply committed Christian. She was a very devout Presbyterian. Those three people enabled us to get the first medical school built in 44 years in Australia. I am told that some 18 universities have now walked through the door that those three great heroes opened for us.

The irony of this—and it gives me no joy to say this—is that in spite of 200 doctors a year coming out of the Townsville University, and in spite of incredible efforts by Professor Ronski and the dean of the faculty, who are doing everything humanly possible to get those doctors to service the regional centres, we still can't supply the doctors to these places. You can offer half a million dollars a year on top of what they're getting, and I still don't think you're going to get them to go there until you make it compulsory that they go there before they can practice as a GP.

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