Karen Grogan (SA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Our health system is critical. We should be able to rely on seeing a doctor, being able to get an appointment and, for those who cannot afford to pay, being bulk-billed for that appointment. Yet we've seen 10 years of extreme neglect, including a disastrous policy from the previous government to freeze the Medicare rebate, which has left Australians paying more and waiting longer. Doctors, particularly those in regional areas, were left in a situation where it was no longer viable to keep going in their practices. The reduction in that rebate made a critical difference to their ability to stay afloat or not, so what they did was to turn away from bulk-billing. Many people across this country rely on bulk-billing to be able to get to the doctor and to afford the health services that they need. But in the face of not being able to viably keep their practices going, doctors just walked away from bulk-billing.

As those rates of bulk-billing declined—and they declined quite sharply—we started to hear more and more stories of people being unable to get an appointment at the doctor. We heard more stories of people being unable to actually register with a practice because the doctors were moving away from the regions, particularly. Many practices weren't able to replace the doctors in some of the metro areas, and so you couldn't get an appointment. New patients couldn't register with a GP service, and entire regions—I know certainly in South Australia—had no doctor, and the community was completely and utterly reliant on locum services. Locum services are an essential part of our system, but they do not provide you with continuity of care. Continuity of care is critical for long-term increases in primary health treatments. We've seen those situations get progressively worse—and I hear this from people in my duty electorate of Grey.

Last month, I took the Minister for Health and Aged Care, Mark Butler, out there to meet with some of the people that I talk to frequently. We met with some of the health services and some of the councils who do amazing work to encourage doctors, nurses and other health professionals to go and live in their communities. The Northern Eyre Peninsula Health Alliance, particularly, have done a spectacular job over the last number of years in trying to build up the health service across that region. They and many, many other councils in those areas have their innovative approaches to securing health services for their regions.

Last weekend we saw the largest investment in bulk-billing in the 40-year history of Medicare when we tripled the bulk-billing incentive for local GPs. We've heard from GPs that this is a game-changer, and we know that this will encourage them to go back to bulk-billing to take the pressure off those communities who have been left out of the system by not being able to access a bulk-billing service. It will go a long way to help those who are facing cost-of-living challenges, keeping more money in their pocket and giving them better access to affordable health care and affordable medical practices. On top of that investment, there's a whole range of other changes to our health system to strengthen Medicare and to open up access by making it more affordable and more accessible for Australians across the whole of this country to access the health care that they need and that they deserve.

Indeed, we have put $1½ billion in indexation payments to boost Medicare rebates across the board—again, to make it viable for doctors to be in regional and rural communities and to make it viable to recruit additional doctors to provide the services that our communities so desperately need. So I stand here so proud to be a member of a Labor government that is focused on health care, focused on our communities and focused on fairness.