Sophie Mirabella (Indi, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Early Childhood Education, Childcare, Women and Youth) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Confidence is indeed very important and in my electorate of Indi there are certain areas that are having their confidence in the health system seriously shaken. It is important to have confidence that a health system will provides reasonable access to basic medical services like GPs. I have been contacted by concerned individuals and a concerned local GP about the impact of the government’s changes to the Remoteness Area classification on the availability of GP services in the town of Myrtleford in the Alpine shire. The new classification has the potential to make Myrtleford a less attractive place for GPs to go and practise because on a relative scale there is no incentive for a doctor to work in this small town as opposed, say, to a larger town like Wodonga, Ballarat or Wangaratta. Myrtleford is a town with a population of just under 4½ thousand, so you can imagine how important it is for people in that town to have access to GP services.

Previously the towns of Mount Beauty, Myrtleford and Bright in the Alpine shire were classified RRMA 5; they all had the same treatment. But the government has now decided to have this arbitrary geographic reclassification of areas. A lot of other country towns are being placed in this situation, not just in my electorate or in Victoria but right across-the-board. It is very difficult, as those in Euroa and Violet Town and Rutherglen in my electorate will know, to attract GPs in an environment where there is intense competition to attract GPs to rural and regional areas, and the smaller the town, I have seen from experience in my electorate, the more difficult it is to attract them.

If there are no extra incentives for GPs to go to smaller communities like Myrtleford, then there is a risk that the proportion of GPs per capita in those towns will fall because doctors will often prefer—if the incentives are the same—to go to larger centres. I hope that will not be the case, but locals in my area and local GPs are concerned. I think, as these local concerns are real, that the government should look at these classifications and should seriously look at reviewing them for the sake of rural communities.