Julian McGauran (Victoria, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I wish to bring to the attention of the Senate a wasteful and mismanaged program in the health portfolio to rival the pink batts scheme and the Building the Education Revolution program. The government’s announced superclinic program, with outlays of billions of dollars, is heading down the road of Building the Education Revolution, where mismanagement will cost billions of dollars. The Australian Medical Association has strongly advised the government against pouring taxpayers’ money into the superclinics program without proper consultation. It was reported last month that the president of the Tasmanian AMA said that the superclinics were unsustainable. The Mercury reported:

State president Michael Aizen predicted the Clarence clinic would be forced to close within five to 10 years.

He said the Whitlam government had set up community health centres offering every conceivable service under one roof, like the super clinics.

“They could not get enough doctors to make it viable … after 10 years they sold off the buildings,” Dr Aizen said.

“This is what’s going to happen with the super clinics, it’s a different name but the concept is similar—

to the Whitlam government. What a coincidence! The article went on:

He said the Government was only intending to offer GPs sign-on fees of around $50,000, while much higher-paying private clinics already struggled to recruit doctors.

“When you look at the so-called big corporate practices, they offer the GPs something like $400,000 or $500,000 in sign-on fees … if doctors don’t want to sign on to the private corporate clinics why would they sign on to one of these super clinics?”

History was “doomed to repeat itself”, he added.

The prime example I can give of this mismanagement and waste is the location chosen by the government for the superclinic in Berwick, Victoria. Berwick is an outer suburb of Melbourne in the seat of La Trobe. There was much fanfare around the announcement of this superclinic and it is currently in the very early stages of construction. Victorian Senator Jacinta Collins got up in this place and spoke glowingly of the Berwick superclinic. The Prime Minister toured the site only last month, with great fanfare. Tagging along with him was the Labor candidate for La Trobe. At every opportunity the Labor candidate got, he took credit for the superclinic coming to Berwick and, of course, the Prime Minister gave him every opportunity to take such credit.

So with the full prime ministerial imprimatur this multimillion dollar clinic in Berwick is being established. Its location is very important. The government clinic will be located on the grounds of the Monash University Berwick campus on the corner of Clyde Road and Kangan Drive—across from McDonald’s, for those who want to go looking for it. This location hardly seems to fit the criteria set out in the government’s budget papers for superclinics. An ALGA fact sheet on the 2008-09 budget says:

People living in GP Super Clinic locations (in a diverse range of areas, from what might be considered traditionally ‘remote’ in Mt Isa, to areas with expanding populations such as Palmerston in the Northern Territory, to other regional centres and rural locations including Geelong, the Riverina and Ipswich) …

They were the broad guidelines of where a superclinic should be set up. I can assure you that Berwick in Victoria does not fit any part of the guidelines in the budget statements.

You might think that, if it did not fit that criterion, it must be an outer suburb that has a shortage of doctors. According to the government’s own criteria there is not a shortage of doctors in the area. According to the government’s own rating system of districts of workforce shortage, the Berwick-Casey district is not deemed a DWS, which is another criterion for establishing superclinics. So not only does it have to satisfy what I read out before from the budget papers but it must be in a DWS deemed to have a shortage of doctors, and Berwick is not deemed to have a shortage of doctors.

Could it be that the government just thought the area needed a superclinic anyway because they did not have any such medical facility in the area? I wish to inform the Senate that the area has two superclinics already. Both are privately run, operating very well and servicing the needs of the local hospital and the local people. Moreover, the multimillion dollar government superclinic is being built less than a minute by car from the Casey Superclinic, which is one of the privately run superclinics, and less than five minutes from the second large medical centre, the Narregate Medical and Dental Centre. So within five minutes by car there will be three substantial superclinics. What bumbling bureaucrat pinned on the map this development, and what goofy minister ticked it off?

As I said, within less than five kilometres, or five minutes, there will be three superclinics, creating an oversupply of doctors in that area which was not even deemed to have a doctor shortage in the first place. Therefore, I again quote the President of the AMA, who made this statement and set these criteria for placing superclinics:

The locations should be done in consultation with the profession to find out where they’re going to get the best return for their investment with a minimum of unfair competition with existing practices, who have been working very, very hard to provide a service.

Perhaps I was a little bit too harsh in asking what ‘bumbling bureaucrat’ or what ‘goofy minister’ allocated millions of taxpayers’ dollars where it is frankly not needed. It is probably more likely a policy of locating the superclinics based on raw, base politics, because the seat of La Trobe, held by the Liberal Party, is on the slimmest of margins. The Prime Minister visited the site, taking the candidate along with him—a candidate who was trying to take credit for the establishment of the superclinic and, as I said, the Prime Minister was giving him the credit. It adds up to the typical modus operandi of the Labor Party: base political game playing at the expense of taxpayers, at the expense of tens of millions of dollars.

It would be impossible for the government to ignore the private operators that service the hospital and the surrounding areas which operate competitively and efficiently, and it would be impossible for the government to ignore that the area was not on the doctor shortage list, the DWS section. The truth is that the superclinics program is yet another farce of the Rudd government at taxpayers’ expense, where millions are wasted and mismanaged, all in the government’s base political attempt to ingratiate themselves with the people of La Trobe. The superclinics program ought to be scrapped and the funds redirected into genuine, efficient and needed medical services, not political rorting.