Bob Katter (Kennedy, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

I too have chosen to speak about the health crisis in Queensland. I said at question time yesterday, and I will repeat again here, that there are five major hospitals in Queensland whose emergency services are now officially declared unsafe. There are a further three that have been officially declared critical and possibly unsafe. This represents nearly one-third of the state population as being in the deepest of deep crises. The Gold Coast is not, Brisbane is not and Townsville is not, but, generalising, almost the entire rest of the state is. If you take out the Townsville area—some 150,000 from the million people living in the northern half of Queensland—then you have some picture as far as North Queensland and Northern Australia are concerned.

For the northern half of Queensland—and we are still chasing the figures for specialists, so I can only give the figure for outside the Townsville-Cairns city area—there is one doctor per 1,026 people. The average for Australia is one doctor per 358 people. This is not a situation in crisis; it is a situation collapsing. Mr Deputy Speaker Causley, you were probably the third-ranking minister in the New South Wales government for a number of years. Likewise I was a minister in the Queensland government. We both come from places where we ruled as part of a government. We are well aware that sometimes problems arise that cannot be solved. But in this case, if Mr Beattie went to England and waved around a $250,000 a year salary package, which quite frankly is well below what a lot of the doctors are now receiving in country centres in Queensland, he would be killed in the rush.

I am not speaking here about something that I do not know anything about. In fact, I have had to live with this sort of situation all of my life—for the last 32 years in parliament. There was another shocking case in Queensland—Mr Beattie’s malperformance is not new in the state of Queensland. It is abysmally worse than that of any predecessor, but it is not new. When I was state member for the state seat in North Queensland, the health department informed us officially that they could only find three doctors. They sent two officers overseas and they came back with three doctors. Dr David Harvey Sutton, who was our family doctor in the little tiny town of Cloncurry—3,000 people and a single doctor—went over to England and came back with 23 doctors. The Queensland government had a health budget at the time of about $2,000 million, and they could only find three doctors. This little GP operating in Cloncurry could find 23, and he put them on the ground. I can actually remember most of their names. I can reel them off.

Whilst we have had this problem for a long time, it is now qualitatively different. The whole of the health system in Queensland is simply collapsing. Mr Beattie and the Queensland government have now known this for some nine—arguably 15—months. And what have they done to address the problem? I am very much aware of the problem. Nearly 1,000 people turned up to the protest meeting in Mareeba, one of the big towns in my electorate, when the state government suggested that Mareeba Hospital be closed and we drive an hour up the road to Atherton if any of us get sick or have an emergency. That was the proposal put forward. Under terrific public pressure throughout all of Far North Queensland, the government backed down.

In my home town of Charters Towers, we have gone from 13 doctors at the start of last year down to seven doctors now. The mayor from Cloncurry, the midwest town, came to see me here at Parliament House. He had won a national prize. He came in to address me and say that the situation in the western centres is absolutely critical. (Time expired)

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