Chris Hayes (Werriwa, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I congratulate the member for Hindmarsh for bringing this motion to the attention of the House. I could not agree more with his sentiments—perhaps taking a slightly different view than the member for Gwydir on this subject. Electorates like my own are currently paying the price for the cuts to doctor training that were introduced in 1996, the year that this government took office. Werriwa currently has a ratio of population to full-time equivalent GPs of 1,700 to one—that is, 1,700 people for every full-time equivalent GP. This is in contrast to the Department of Health and Ageing recommended acceptable levels: a ratio of around 1,200 to one.

Recently, the shadow minister for health, Julia Gillard, visited my electorate with me at Carnes Hill. We were presented with a petition from over 1,000 residents from that one suburb calling for more doctor training. Since that time, I have been receiving many petitions in my office dealing with the same subject. I would like to take the opportunity to thank Graham Conroy for his efforts in collecting those signatures. As a resident of that area and someone who is particularly concerned about the state of health and the provision of GPs—like the concerns of many other people in Carnes Hill—he has made it his task to go out and have this discussion within his suburb.

Constituents in my electorate are paying the price of GP training places that were reduced to 400 when this government took office—and it put that in as a first-order priority after the 1996 election. Nearly half the households in my electorate—and, I assume, in many other growing and younger electorates—contain couples and dependent children. These families are now concerned that they will not have access to medical care when they need it and when their kids need it.

What is worse, the cuts to the health programs keep coming under this government. In the last budget alone, the government decided that that it would slash the More Doctors for Outer Metropolitan Areas program by $1.5 million. This program has already assisted two doctors relocating to my electorate of Werriwa. But, instead of using it to encourage more doctors to relocate to the outer metropolitan areas of Sydney, this government has decided to cut the program. It is clear that health simply is not the priority of the Howard government.

This government will say that the problems it faces in health care are all the fault of state governments. The member for Gwydir is no different. That is precisely what he was trying to argue in his contribution to this debate. The blame game is not what the residents of my electorate want to hear. They want to know that, when they need it, they will have access to health care and that their family will have access to proper health care when it is needed. They want to know that, when they are sick or when their kids are sick, there will be someone available to help them.

I welcome the fact that the University of Western Sydney will have its medical school up and running very shortly and will be training students in the outer metropolitan areas of Sydney. I am confident that the school will produce excellent doctors, as the staff who are involved with the school—people like Professor Neville Yeomans, the head of the school, and Dr Andrew McDonald, the assistant professor, who is also head of paediatrics at Campbelltown Hospital—are highly dedicated and will work hard to produce their best efforts when producing doctors for our area, for outer metropolitan Sydney. But they know that this will not resolve our immediate problem. They will not be able to produce doctors for a number of years. Add to that the fact that a recent survey from the medical profession reports that many GPs are saying now that doctors should specialise rather than go into general practice, and that obviously paints a very grim picture for health care provided by our system.

The government boasts that it is spending record amounts on health, yet the budget document says otherwise. It is cutting the PBS. It will only fund bulk-billing initiatives for a further two years. It is wasting money on advertising to prop up private health insurers, and additional funding for medical research that is promised now appears in the budget to be conditional on the sale of Medibank Private. What is worse for people in my electorate is cutting the More Doctors for Outer Metropolitan Areas program. This is a disgrace, and it reflects the attitude that is being exhibited by this government.

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