Anne Webster (Mallee, National Party, Shadow Minister for Regional Development, Local Government and Territories) | Hansard source

Your postcode shouldn't decide whether you can see a doctor, whether your child receives care or whether a loved one survives, but, in Mallee, too often that is the brutal reality. From Mildura to Swan Hill and from Ouyen to Horsham, St Arnaud, Robinvale and Dimboola, people know what Labor's regional health failure looks like. It looks like weeks waiting for a GP appointment, families driving up to six hours for specialist care and older Australians delaying treatment because fuel, accommodation, lost wages and out-of-pocket costs are simply too much. This is no longer just a staffing problem; it is a patient crisis and a financial crisis for regional health services.

When hospitals and aged-care providers cannot recruit permanent doctors, nurses, midwives, allied health workers and aged-care staff, they are forced into a desperate cycle of locums and agency nurses at enormous cost—let alone the increasing FIFO specialist workforce. Every dollar spent plugging roster gaps with short-term staff is a dollar not spent supporting permanent teams or improving patient care. Labor's failure to build and retain a real regional health workforce is forcing country health services to burn scarce funding just to keep the lights on, and patients pay the price.

The workforce crisis is the crisis. Without health professionals in our towns there is no access, no continuity of care, no early intervention and certainly no prevention. People get sicker. Patients present to hospital acutely unwell, when earlier care could have prevented it. Labor can shout slogans about Medicare all it likes, but slogans do not open a GP appointment in Ouyen, deliver allied health in Dimboola, keep maternity services safe or bring specialists to Horsham or Mildura.

This Labor government has failed to address the lack of a regional health workforce at the scale required. It has pushed metro-centric policies and offered political bandaids when the bush needs structural reform. Regional Australia needs end-to-end rural training to grow our own workforce from local kids and to keep them. We need real incentives for clinicians to live and work in regional communities. We need funding models that recognise distance, disadvantage, thin markets and chronic disease. Regional health care is not and should not be second-class health care.

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