James Stevens (Sturt, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to support the second reading of the Higher Education Support Amendment (2022 Measures No. 1) Bill 2022, which has two elements—both former measures from the previous government—the second one of which has been the focus of people's contributions for ways in which we can better support young students to take up opportunities in regional and remote settings. This bill provides a significant incentive through dramatic relief to student loans—in fact, the complete extinguishment of them up to a certain amount, depending on where you go and how long you go for.

This is a good example of a debate on a topic that we don't discuss that regularly in this chamber. I absolutely love Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane, our three great metropolises. The three of them combined are home to the vast majority of people that sit in this chamber. If you take the greater urban areas of those three centres, they house the vast, vast majority of the population of this country. When we're discussing national policy, sometimes it is important to think about whether or not there are different opportunities and different forces at play in our economy and our society depending on whether you're in those three mega urban areas or somewhere else.

I am from the City of Adelaide—not a remote or regional area but a city of about 1.3 million people and second biggest urban area, after Perth, following those three mega areas. The state of South Australia is really a city state, so we have only about another 300,000 people in the state that don't live in urban Adelaide. If you got a compass on a map, set it to 100 kilometres and drew a circle around Adelaide from the GPO, you'd capture almost the entirety of the population of South Australia. Even though France and Germany could very easily fit within the boundaries of the state of South Australia, outside of that 100-kilometre radius from the City of Adelaide, we are a very sparsely populated state. Even though the challenges that this part of the bill is targeted to don't necessarily relate to the delivery of services my electorate, it's a bill that's extremely important to my state and to any Australian that cares about all Australians getting proper equity of access to services not just in health but across all services.

In this case, we're talking about health. The issue with the way in which our population is distributed is that in areas like health—and other areas like migration—we have a situation where those three major urban areas tend to be the magnets that attract people from a wide variety of points of view. The economies of scale in the big cities, particularly the cultural ones, lead many people to decide that, if they have the choice, they'd prefer to choose the life in the big cities than the other options available to them. I know that people who sit in this chamber who represent communities that aren't in the big cities very proudly dispute the enjoyment of life in smaller communities being less than in bigger ones, and I think they've got a lot of credibility in what they say. But that is invariably the reality of the challenge that we seek to address.

Previous speakers who represent electorates with regional and remote communities have talked about the personal impact of struggling to attract general practitioners and other medical practitioners to their communities. The member for Kennedy obviously talked about some direct impacts on his family. It's obviously quite tragic and very regrettable that, in his view, which I'm sure is accurate, the tyranny of distance for medical services led to the premature death of two of his family members.

I lived for a couple of years as a child on Norfolk Island. That is an extremely remote place to live. It wasn't very difficult to get a GP to do a couple of years posting on Norfolk Island for reasons that I believe I shouldn't need to outline. Nonetheless, we had that one GP on the island for a population of about 2,000 people in the South Pacific. In the 1980s there was not an aircraft sitting there on the airstrip waiting to medevac people to any other care facilities at the drop of a hat. So the GP there was obviously very much the guardian of life-or-death medical emergency issues. At least back then, we had a small hospital capability but obviously not one much beyond emergency issues. The general practitioner was really just working absolutely full time. If something happened in the middle of the night and you needed medical assistance then she got the call. So it's difficult. I know we have some medical professionals in the room. Being on call permanently means you don't get to enjoy a glass of red wine on Saturday night at a dinner party because at any point you could be called and asked to provide some assistance. For me, as a young boy of five, six and seven, my very first memories of a country GP were of what dedicated service they give to the community.

It is regrettable that we find ourselves in the challenging circumstance in the 2020s where it is becoming more and more difficult to attract people across a variety of allied health professions but particularly GPs in a permanent way to regional towns. My colleague the member for Grey very regularly raises this issue in this chamber. I absolutely defer to his experiences in his electorate. He represents the vast majority of the state of South Australia, where I am from. I know they have ongoing significant challenges all the time with attracting GPs to certain towns in his electorate, including his home town of Kimba. That has been quite a challenge in recent times.

This bill is one measure that we can pursue to make it more appealing, through the forgiveness of student loans, for more younger people to take up the opportunity of working in regional areas. Apart from the service that they might give in that community, it might take three to six years to qualify for the complete eradication of their student loan. We also hope that in that three or six years they fall in love with the community that they have gone to work in. I think that's a very reasonable expectation. That will probably happen in many circumstances. Certainly, that's the ultimate outcome—that someone goes to a regional community to be their GP for a few years, supported through this scheme. It might make the difference between taking that opportunity and not. Hopefully, it's not three years. Hopefully, it's 20 or 30 years because they find that they have fallen in love with the community and the lifestyle and they see that community as somewhere for them to make a future with their family. That's the hope of the main measure in schedule 2 of this bill, and certainly it's something that we intend to put in place in government. It's not a silver bullet. It's not by any means going to exclusively solve the challenges—far from it. But I think solving the challenge of these workforce shortages is going to mean multiple measures, of which this can be one of many, that come together to make sure that we are doing all that we can to provide the very best of health services to every Australian. Every Australian deserves equity of access to all services that government provides, but none are more important than access to the highest standard of health care. With those comments, I certainly commend the bill to the chamber and look forward to the passage of this legislation so the benefits of it can start to be felt in regional and remote communities in this country as soon as possible.

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