Anne Webster (Mallee, National Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Regional Development) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

We welcome a new year but some things have not changed. The fact that Labor continues to ignore, at best, or rip out the heart of regional areas, at worst, surprises no-one who lives there. It's not only at a federal level but also at a state level that Labor have proven to have no regard for anybody outside their city electorates. This past week I have been inundated with calls from the residents of Stawell, a town of 8,000 people in the south of my electorate. In two months, Stawell medical clinic has sadly lost 50 per cent of its doctors; it is down from six to three. Fourteen months ago an amalgamation occurred under Ballarat Health Services, with Edenhope and District Memorial Hospital and Wimmera Healthcare Group to form Grampians Health. They are organised under the auspices of the Victorian Labor government.

At the time of the proposed amalgamation there was an uproar from residents who did not want health care to be centralised in Ballarat and yet it has come to pass. One outgoing doctor described the Stawell community as his second family but told me that, financially, he couldn't go on practising in the town under new contract conditions he was offered by Grampians Health. Grampians Health wants to pay its doctors a sessional rate but, in smaller towns, typically, doctors are paid fee-for-service. It is a reasonable incentive for a regional doctor, who often has to travel from the city to commit services in a regional town.

The doctor I spoke to had served the Stawell community for over 15 years. The Grampians Health chair told me their major stakeholder was the Victorian Labor government and Ballarat Health. What about the regional patients they are supposed to serve? Clearly, cheap options are the best options but not when you lose your doctors. The doctor is one of three who have left but it is the townspeople who lose. This doctor's passion for the community moved me to tears. Now he has to say goodbye because he could not afford to work under, let's face it, the state government terms.

For the past month I have had a survey open for my constituents to tell me their experiences of health care in Mallee. I am getting the same story repeated from residents in Stawell and indeed across the electorate. 'We are in crisis,' they cry. Meanwhile, those opposite and their state Labor counterparts continue to ignore this unfolding tragedy. Labor do not have a plan to fix regional health care and, worse, they do not respect the doctors who have gone out of their way to serve smaller communities that would otherwise have no doctor. Instead of improving regional health care, they are making it worse. I hope this government and the Victorian Labor government can prove me wrong. At the moment it is looking like a new year— (Time expired)