Andrew Broad (Mallee, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

That was a fantastic speech. I pay credit to the other side. One of the best things about having a break from Canberra is that I get to go on the Great Country Towns Tour, and all the great country towns happen to be located in the electorate of Mallee. People ask: why does democracy work? Democracy works largely because we don't spend all our time here. We don't get caught in the Canberra bubble. In fact, members of the House of Representatives get out there and people set us straight about the things that are important to them. As I travel around the great country towns, the basics are important: being able to drive on a decent road, being able to make a mobile phone call and being able to have access to telecommunications.

One of the things that happened while sitting around the coffee shops was that people would raise their concerns about mobile broadband. We had an Optus phone and we had a Telstra phone and we would go to their house afterwards to see what the options were. This is something the parliament might be interested in. Sky Muster is offering 300 gigabytes of data at a figure of $150, and that is peak and off-peak. Optus is now offering 200 gigabytes for $70 and it's faster. We were able to help people work through what is available. With regard to driving on a decent road, we took notes of where the roads were poor and then wrote to the Victorian roads minister and to VicRoads, highlighting the roads that need an upgrade.

The other thing people raised with us is doctors. We have an interesting situation. The Howard government introduced things to train more doctors and those things appear to have worked. We have more doctors practising now, but we're still having trouble bringing them to the regions, so much so that one of our hospitals is offering a package of nearly $400,000, with a house and a car, and still can't attract doctors. A clinic in Horsham said they have packages for 12 GPs who don't have to work on weekends and will rotate, and they still can't attract doctors. That is something we really have to look at. It's not the lack of trained doctors now; it's about how you move them into the regions. That, I think, is the real challenge. Just because you live in regional Australia does not mean you should have a second-rate level of health.

So those are the things that I think keep members of parliament grounded—we actually go out there and talk to people in our patch. I have to say that it was very humbling to go to met with Karen refugees and talk to one of the ladies there who had just failed her English test in a work visa she had gone for, and yet her English was very good. So we've been able to take that back to the parliament. The Great Country Towns Tour is such an important part of being a local member and being a member of the parliament. It's the fact that we get out, talk to our people and bring that back that parliament works.