David Gillespie (Lyne, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise in support of this bill, the Higher Education Support Amendment (2002 Measures No. 1) Bill 2022, and the amendment foreshadowed by the shadow minister for education.

The biggest compliment one can get is that of imitation. This bill comes from legislation I introduced when I was the Minister for Regional Health. I'm so pleased that the current Labor government has decided to back the initiative, because we do have a problem. We have a major shortage of multiskilled general practitioners and nurse practitioners in regional and remote Australia. We have a shortage of general practitioners even in suburbia, but the situation is worst in regional Australia.

The initiative at the heart of this bill is to give graduates in medicine and nurse practitioner studies relief from repayment of their HECS-HELP debt. If you work in very remote Australia, an area defined by the Modified Monash Model classification system as MMM 6 or MMM 7, for the length of your postgraduate degree—either a nurse practitioner degree or a medical degree—you get two years credit for one year worked. If you do a six-year medical degree and you work for three years in rural and remote Australia, your HECS debt will be wiped—it will be relieved. For nurse practitioners it's a two-year postgraduate doctorate, which means that if you do one year in an area that's between regional and very remote it's one for one. If you've done a six-year medical degree and you've done six years of service, the HECS debt, which can amount to $100,000, is waived. The minimum amount you've got to do is half your medical degree. You can't just turn up for six months and get the benefit; you've got to do the hard yards. That involves working 24 hours a week in that area as a doctor or as a nurse practitioner.

There were a few bumps in the classification system, so this bill includes amendments to cover people who, up until 1 January 2021, had been enrolled in a postgraduate master's degree in medical practice. They are now effectively grandfathered and covered.

This initiative will shift people. A lot of people really like their experience as a med student when they are doing their rotations through regional Australia. We've organised for half of the training at med school and for medical registrars to be done in regional Australia, acknowledging the shortage of workforce. But having this financial carrot makes a lot of sense to younger graduates at a stage in their life when they are putting down roots. If I could have offered this during the period of government back to 2013, I wonder how many more doctors and nurse practitioners would have stayed.

The shadow minister for education has foreshadowed an amendment that calls for a review of these changes to take place two years after they're put in place. We want the review to consider, with the help of the National Rural Health Commissioner and the Regional Education Commissioner, other health graduates that are in equally short supply in regional Australia. Pharmacists, clinical psychologists, physiotherapists—all of those professions are really lacking. There's this huge magnet that drags people into metro Australia, and we really want to shift the dial on that. That's why we'll be moving this amendment.

Overall, this is a great bill. I'm not trying to blow my own trumpet, but it really is a good idea. People in the industry recommended it, and I support this bill to the hilt.

Debate interrupted.

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