David Feeney (Victoria, Australian Labor Party, Parliamentary Secretary for Defence) Share this | Hansard source

Those opposite might contain their enthusiasm for a moment in the faint hope—dare I say ‘risk’—that they may learn something. GP practice upgrades have meant 4,600 practice nurses and 28 of the original 36 GPs superclinics are now either completed, operating interim services or under construction. These are real and tangible gains. If those opposite had struggled through the trauma of watching them being built and dealt with their own policy failures, they would have seen that for some communities they represent real achievements and real improvements. We lifted the cap on Mr Abbott’s GP training quota and that will mean that by 2014 we will have doubled the number of GPs entering training—that is to say that the pipeline of trained GPs has been opened again by federal Labor after it was strangled not only by a coalition government but by Abbott, who was then minister for health.