Pat Conroy (Shortland, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Defence Industry) Share this | Hansard source

After the cost of living, the No. 1 priority for my region and my electorate of Shortland is equitable access to health care, being able to see a doctor when you need it using your Medicare card. This government has been laser-like in our focus on improving access to primary health care for people in my region. Since the election, we've restored the distribution priority access listing for Lake Macquarie and the Central Coast. For some bizarre reason, the last government, the Liberal government, declared war on health care in my region by banning overseas trained doctors and Australian scholarship doctors from being able to practice in my community. We fixed that. Secondly, we restored funding and saved the much loved GP access after-hours service, so, if it's 10:00 on a Sunday night and you need access for a kid to see a doctor but it's not quite serious enough to get to the emergency department, you can see a GP at the Belmont Hospital, the John Hunter and a few other clinics in our community if you need to.

Those two were important initial moves. We then matched them with strong funding for Medicare urgent care clinics—one on the northern Central Coast at Lake Haven and one at Charlestown. The one at Charlestown is one of the busiest in the countries, and we've served it with additional funding to increase the hours, so you can go there between 8 am and 10 pm every day of the year to see a doctor for free without an appointment, and we've funded additional staff for it. We've also tripled the bulk-billing incentive for visits to doctors. I'm sad to say that our health community hasn't responded as fast as the rest of the country in terms of lifting bulk-billing rates. They have improved, but they are not at the national level, so we've made extra interventions as part of this budget. I'm so pleased that the advocacy of both myself and the other Hunter and Central Coast members have led to a $25 million package to put six bulk-billing clinics into our community. These clinics will mean that our patients can see a doctor for free. All you'll need is your Medicare card. Importantly, they'll also increase competition in our community for access to healthcare services.

Initiatives have shown that, when this has been put in place in places like Rockhampton, the ring of surrounding GPS have a choice. They either lose patients to the new bulk-billing clinic or revert to bulk billing, and history has shown that bulk-billing rates increase. I'm very hopeful that not only will this clinic bulk-bill but it will lead to an increase in bulk-billing rates in my community in surrounding practices. My community should get access to fully bulk-billed visits as much as every other community in this country. In the end, all you should need in order to see a doctor is a Medicare card and not your credit card. That's what the Albanese Labor government is putting in place in our record investments in Medicare in this community.

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