Deborah O'Neill (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Let's get to the reality of what Medicare does and why we're talking about GPs today. The government of the last nine years, and their various iterations over the last few decades, have attacked Medicare at every turn. The main cause of a bankruptcy before Medicare was medical debt—Australians died or they sold their house. Finally, the Labor Party moved to make sure that was no longer the case, and Medicare was established. In establishing that, we change the course of the health of this nation in a very positive way. It was attacked relentlessly by every iteration of the federal Liberal-National government that came after. That's what we've seen over the last nine years, so let's get a little bit of fact on the record.

The reality that we confronted when the Rudd-Gillard government was established was that there was a declining number of GPs being trained. We completely changed that and ramped up training of our own. Mr Abbott's solution as health minister was to stop training Australians and bring in overseas-trained doctors. It was a short-term decision and a bad long-term decision. The reality is that those wonderful GPs that we trained happened to come out into a medical profession that was being ripped asunder by the Abbott government. When they froze Medicare, they basically kicked out from underneath the business model of our GPs their sustainability as a practice. What happened with those smart cookies who were training to be GPs? They had a look at these businesses in collapse, destroyed by the Australian government, and they said, 'Hold on, I don't really want to be a GP anymore.' We don't have a training problem in terms of the numbers. We have a problem of a broken business model that has destroyed GP practices across this country. Right across this country, it's the Liberal and National parties, who always pump themselves up as being great understanders of businesses, who broke the back of the GP business model for Australia.

The reality that we confront right now is because of that failure. Because they broke access to GPs, they decided to tinker with this thing that they called the DPA or Distribution Priority Area. On the record, in the other chamber today, the Minister for Health and Aged Care very clearly indicated that the changes we were being asked about here today—changes to the DPA that Labor has instituted—were to reverse a cut made by the former government in 2019. It was a reverse to what that government had done in terms of denying Australians in this country access to a GP. They did that as a response to the failure of their own policies of ruining Australian's access to GPs. And then they thought they could just shrink the places in which it was distributed.

On the Central Coast, there was evidence given to our committee—it was a Labor instituted GP shortage inquiry. It was our committee that determined to tell the reality of what's going on in Australia. Whether we were taking evidence in Victoria, Queensland, New South Wales or out in Whyalla, it was the same story everywhere: a completely ruined system and communities in desperate need of doctors. And it's the responsibility of the former government that we do not have that workforce today.

Now Labor have come in. We've been here, what, 108 days. We can't undo everything that they did wrong, but this really egregious move of cutting the DPA in 2019 was a con job by the former government. It didn't fix the problem. It bought them time, but what it didn't do was give Australians access to the health care that they paid for and the health care that they deserve. Labor is on the job of fixing the mess in the health sector that we have been left by the former government, and Australians can trust that the Labor Party who built Medicare will restore the integrity that the system deserves.