Rob Mitchell (McEwen, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Access to medical care is so important to people living in outer metropolitan areas and regional areas. It's one of the fundamental rights we should have as an Australian to be able to see a doctor when we need it, no matter where we are, no matter what our postcode is. Sadly, what we've seen over eight long years of the Morrison-Turnbull-Abbott governments and all the other iterations of the interchangeable National Party Deputy Prime Ministers is that health care in outer regional and regional areas is impacted because this government has had its eye on itself and not on the Australian people.

Right across the Goulburn and Hume region of Victoria we've seen a shortage of doctors and availability for people to get access to medical care 24 hours a day. This particularly impacts all those who are shift workers and those in insecure work, but also, particularly, mothers and their children, because something the government might not realise is that people don't just get sick from nine to five. This has been raised time and time again with us and time and time again we have raised it in here, and the hapless minister for health has done absolutely nothing about it. It's absolutely appalling that people can't get to see a doctor in our outer suburban and outer metropolitan areas.

One of the major problems has been the government's absolute failure when it comes to addressing the District of Workforce Shortage areas across our region—supporting doctors to come out of the big inner cities and work in our regional areas. You would think, given that the other side have a few doctors over there, they would be well aware of this and perhaps would be more understanding and more supportive of ensuring that we have, in our growing outer suburbs and our regional areas, doctors available to meet the needs of growing communities. But, sadly, as I've said, they've failed us absolutely dramatically, right across this region. So we see queues of people heading down towards the city hospitals and clogging up their emergency departments because we can't get doctors in regional areas. You would think that these parties, that claim they are the parties for regional Australia, would be out there supporting an increase to the numbers of doctors in areas of workforce shortage in regional areas, but we can't find anyone supporting that. That has been pushed very hard by communities who are suffering a lot from not being able to take their kids to the doctor and not being able to see health professionals where they need them, to the point where country hospitals have trouble even doing birthing. It is an absolute disgrace that this is happening in this nation.

It's about time that the minister got off his backside and did something for the people of regional Australia and outer metropolitan areas, instead of sitting up here in Canberra, hiding away from what's happening in the real world. This wouldn't happen under an Albanese Labor government. We're on your side—unlike this lot, who are on their own side.