Ms Catherine King (Ballarat, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Health) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I want to use the opportunity of the adjournment tonight to highlight the concerns the opposition has with the government's closure of Medicare Locals and transition to their new primary health network and certainly raise many of the concerns that have been raised not just by Medicare Locals but by those communities that are about to be affected by very significant change. Leaving aside, obviously, the fact that the now government did say that they were not going to be closing any of the Medicare Locals in the lead-up to the federal election and during the election campaign, it is pretty evident that the now government did wish to close and abolish all Medicare Locals but found themselves wedged during the election campaign and so made that statement.

The decision to close every Medicare Local and to move to the primary health network is causing significant anxiety amongst the sector, and not just amongst the sector but amongst the many, many services that are being provided and in regional and rural communities in particular. We know that Medicare Locals are, despite the government's attempts to paint them as mere bureaucracies, in fact providing substantial amounts of front-line services, particularly when it comes to allied health. We know that they are providing after-hours services, ATAPS and commissioning the ATAPS program, Partners in Recovery, and out of the flexible funding pool they are providing substantial allied health services, particularly in communities in Far North Queensland and in some of our more rural areas. They are providing access to speech pathology, psychologists and other services that have not been provided before.

The problem that we are hearing very strongly from the Medicare Local network—and I visited well over a third of the Medicare Locals across the country—is threefold. The first is that the government appears to not quite understand the role of Medicare Locals. It seems to be pushing for a view that the new primary health networks will be mere purchasers of services, and that does not accord with the roles that Medicare Locals were undertaking, even according to the Horvath review.

We also know that there are already funds that have been withdrawn from Medicare Locals. The estimate is about $70 million, and those have been drawn back into the department. The department tells us that that money is not being used to run the tender process. We already know as part of the review into Medicare Locals that there was over $500,000 in consultancies. We know that McGrathNicol has been engaged to move to the PHN or to wind up Medicare Locals. There are substantial costs involved in this. That is $70 million that has been drawn out of front-line services.

We also know that the estimates to wind up Medicare Locals are around the $100 million mark. That is in forgone contracts, rental and staff entitlements that they will have to find. That is $100 million—we think it is a little bit more than that, but that is from reports from the sector—that will be gone out of front-line service delivery. The Medicare Locals are now being told that whilst they are expected to wind up on 30 June, potentially they may have to exist beyond that because of the need to transition front-line services, and potentially that the new primary health networks will be purchasers of those services from Medicare Locals.

What all of this says to me very clearly, despite the fact that the government is I think now actually struggling to write the tender process, is that there is a substantial amount of waste occurring in a transition that at the end of the day may have no appreciable gain. There will be no appreciable gain in terms of providing better integration of services, nor in making sure that we provide those services that are needed in rural and regional communities, particularly in allied health and the networks that are supporting all of those allied health workers. We are getting reports in from Medicare Locals around the country that they have had staff leaving and they are not able to fill those allied health positions, particularly in some of the more remote communities, particularly in Far North Queensland.

I think the government really needs to be held to account for what potentially is a massive upheaval in primary care and in attempts to achieve better integration in primary care and the waste of around about $170 million that we know of to date. Again, this is for no appreciable gain in the change to Health and Hospitals reform. I want to put on record the opposition's very serious concerns about loss of services and the uncertainty that we are seeing in the sector at the moment. (Time expired)