Mark Butler Hindmarsh, Australian Labor Party, Deputy Leader of the House
2:20 pm
I thank the member for Fowler for her question and for acknowledging the huge results that have gone to her community through our record investment in bulk-billing. I know the Medicare urgent care clinic is doing terrific things. The bulk-billing rates are truly extraordinary in Fowler and in so many other parts of Western Sydney and South Western Sydney, where we see bulk-billing rates now well above 95 per cent. That's terrific for people's hip pocket. It's terrific for their health.
But I do want to address the member's question, because it is a really important one. We've said that we have three pillars to our Strengthening Medicare policy: the urgent care clinics, and the bulk-billing turnaround—both of which are delivering real difference to Australian patients—but also we need more doctors. We particularly need more GPs, and the challenge for us is that they don't grow on trees and they take a while to train. We've added 350 places to medical schools, here in Australia, in our time in government. That has been difficult. Former governments have had real difficulty adding CSPs, or Commonwealth supported places, to medical schools. I remember, back in 2014—the first year of the coalition government—a huge fight between the then government and the AMA about the addition of a new medical school in Perth, through Curtin University.
Three hundred and fifty additional CSPs mean, on average, about 1,800 additional medical students in Australia training to become doctors. What we've always also wanted, though, is for more of them to become GPs. It used to be the case that 50 per cent or so of medical graduates chose general practice as their career of choice. We want—
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