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

No. I do not mean to in any way impugn the previous speaker. She spoke very well and very intelligently. She only made remarks that have been made by every speaker in this place almost every time they speak on these sorts of areas. No, I want to praise the last speaker for everything that she said. I think it was a very good contribution to the House—and I do not give my praise out very generously on these issues. I was not having a go at her, I must emphasise.

But the idea that we can be superior technologically to countries like China—honestly, please! They have 1.3 billion people and they are not exactly dumb. They have a gene pool massively greater than ours. What you do is play to your strengths. This morning I came from a meeting where we were talking about the light metals industry—the aluminium, titanium and magnesium industries. What we can do better than maybe anyone else in the world is the downsteam processing of our quarrying. However, because of the policies of the current government and the last government we cannot downstream process anything, because there is no infrastructure out there to provide and facilitate downstream processing.

Let me be very specific. The area that I represent is the greatest mineral province on earth. It was producing $5,000 million worth and, with metal prices trebling in the last six years, I presume we should be producing close to $15,000 million or maybe $20,000 million worth. We can process what we are producing, but we cannot process any increased production because commercially you can only build a power station to meet current demand. A commercial operator cannot build a power station with excess capacity. They will go broke if they do.

In days past, the giant Gladstone power station was built with no customers at all. It is one of the biggest power stations in Australia. At 1,500 megawatts, I think it may have been the biggest power station in Australia when it was completed. It had no customers at all. But traditionally the great governments of Queensland—the Labor governments prior to the 1950s and the subsequent Country Party governments, later called the National Party; I think when they became National as opposed to Country/National Country they lost their way—had developmentalism built in. To provide that developmentalism we need the technologists in the field of downstream processing.

Let me be very specific here. Metallurgists are needed if you want to convert a quarried material to a completed material. Let me give one example. We mine silicon in Queensland. I am not familiar with the recent figures, but we were selling it to the Japanese at $55 a tonne. The year I did those figures we bought seven tonnes of optical fibre and we paid $3 million a tonne. Do you want to be a quarry and take $55 a tonne or do you want to be a downstream processor and take $3 million a tonne? That is the reason why the Japanese are much wealthier than Australians now. If we cast our mind back to our younger days we would have laughed at anyone who would have considered these people that built little tinplate toys that fell to pieces were going to be richer than Australians. But now they are considerably richer. The last time I looked at the figures they had $32,000 income to our $19,000. We have got to do the downstream processing.

That brings me to the subject of universities, because there is only one university in Australia that provides a metallurgical degree: the University of Western Australia in Perth. We come into this place and talk about technology and the advancement of Australia, but the only thing we are exporting now is metals, and we cannot process them because we have no metallurgists. Thank the good Lord for the Indians; without them, Australia would simply not be able to process any metals at all. Most of our metallurgists are coming from India, and God bless those people.

I wish to speak at some considerable length on the very great achievement of this government, and I want to single out the former Minister for Health and Aged Care, Michael Wooldridge, and the current Minister for Health and Ageing, Tony Abbott. I have dubbed Michael Wooldridge ‘the angel of the bush’. In my second or third year in this place, Aramac-Muttaburra—tiny little twin towns which have 1,500 or 2,000 people at the outside—were without a doctor. Because they are in Central Queensland, I do not think they realised that I was their member of parliament, but anyway, they did not contact me. I found out after about four months that they had been without a doctor, and I took it upon myself to try to find them one. I had a running battle with the state department of health. Each month they told me: ‘We’ve got a doctor now. He’s arriving on such-and-such a date.’ He would not arrive and there would be a subsequent battle.

I have not got the figures that show how many people died or suffered great pain during that period because they had no local doctor, but I will relate a case that occurred during that time. There was a bloke who took a fall in a rodeo, got a kick in the head, and he had a headache. He rang the flying doctor, who said: ‘Take a couple of aspirin and ring us back in a couple of hours. See how you go.’ He got much, much worse, and the doctor said, ‘I’ll have to contemplate going over,’ but, by the time he had decided, the airstrip was out and there was no way that he could get to where the man was. The man subsequently died. The point of the story is: you cannot fly a flying doctor into an area because a bloke has a headache; but you do not know whether the bloke has a headache or a compound fracture of the skull.

If there is no doctor available in a place, the statistics are that you have one death a year that you would not otherwise have. But that is the tip of the iceberg. How many people are in pain or suffering from disease because they have no local doctor? They might be too sick to travel the two or three hours in a car to go to the nearest town where there might be a doctor. They might be in no condition to do that. The doctor most certainly cannot travel to them, and with no local doctor you have a desperate situation.

The Queensland government has failed miserably in this area, and all of Australia is well aware of that. Outside of Brisbane, probably one out of every two of us who go to see a doctor will see a doctor who has difficulties with English. They have difficulties being fluent in a language that is foreign to them. Some of them have mastered English relatively well and some have very great communication difficulties. We love these people and we welcome them to our area. They are considerably better than having no doctor at all, and we thank them for being there. But we have very serious difficulties.

Going back to what I was saying about Aramac-Muttaburra: I decided that, yet again, we should call a meeting to secure a medical school for James Cook University in Townsville. I went to see Michael Wooldridge, and he said that the only real answer for Australia was a medical school at James Cook University. I said: ‘That is wonderful. How about doing it?’ He had a lot of difficulty delivering. Most of the problem is concentrated in Queensland because the population there is very diverse and spread out. That is true to a lesser extent in New South Wales, and the other states have such compressed populations—even Western Australia—that 40 per cent of the problem was in Queensland. Dr Wooldridge said that the problem would be overcome to a large degree by the creation of a medical school, but it was a long and drawn-out battle from there. I wish to thank Mike Horan, the minister in the then Queensland government and in the subsequent Beattie government. I think that Mike Horan did the lion’s share of the work as the minister in Queensland, and then Michael Wooldridge came to the party in Canberra.

I want to track what actually happened with the problem of there being no medical school. They said in the party room that they could not bring all these doctors in because every doctor would vote himself a salary of $300,000 a year and the government could not afford it. I said that I was very pleased that we have acknowledged in the coalition party room that we no longer believe in free trade, and I sat down to roars of laughter from all sides. But of course, my point was profoundly well made, in my opinion. We had free trade in everything except the most important thing of all: the supply of doctors. So the AMA is saying, ‘You can’t have any more doctors coming on stream; they will be a very low class, and you cannot bring them in from overseas because they are substandard to the great teaching institutions that we have in Australia, so we will not have any doctors.’ So we will just die. And for us—we people who live in the bush, outside of the big metropolitan area—that is just too bad for us.

The situation in North Queensland, where there are a million people living now—five per cent of Australia’s population—is that we have only some 800 doctors. We have one doctor per 1,200 people. The figure for Australia is around one doctor per 350 people. We are desperately short of doctors. We are short 2,500 doctors, and even at 150 graduates a year it is going to be a fair while before we catch up to where we want to be. The argument that we are turning out doctors from the University of Queensland does not hold up. If you send a lad or a young lady 2,000 kilometres to a university and have them live there for six years and marry a Brisbane girl or boy, it is foolish to expect them to come back to North Queensland. That ain’t going to happen; it did not and it does not.

They are two great men—and they deserve to be called great men for what they did here. No-one tried harder and did more for us than Michael Wooldridge—the angel of the bush, as I have called him on many occasions. He and Mike Horan were able to bring on stream the first medical school in over 40 years in Australia. It is a disgraceful reflection upon every government in those 40 years that there was no increase in the number of doctors coming on stream. Once the mould was created—once we had that breakthrough at JCU—seven universities have walked through the door that was opened by those two magical people, Michael Wooldridge and Mike Horan.

I want to turn back to North Queensland. I called a meeting, and I could not get a line in the newspaper. One journalist said to me: ‘Hey, Bob, what is this, the 30th committee that has been formed to secure the medical school? We’ve been promised it every election for 28 years and there still ain’t any medical school. Mate, give us news; don’t waste our time.’ So we did not get a line in the press about the meeting. At the meeting, Rhonda Smith, the acting vice-chancellor, appointed probably the greatest living lady in Australia, Lady Pearl Logan—famous for many reasons—to be the chairman of the committee. The enthusiastic supporter of that was a human dynamo called Ian Wronski.

If we have seven medical schools opening up to come to grips with this problem in Australia, then you can thank Ian Ronski; more than anyone else, Wronski is the man to thank. While I do not want to detract from any of these other people whose names I have mentioned, it was Wronski who at times was the human dynamo and the driving force. He had been a doctor in country Australia in the wilds of north-west Western Australia. He had a great passion for looking after people and he saw universities as the places to produce the sorts of people that we need to diminish pain, suffering and death. That is how he sees the university and the university medical school. That human dynamo was in there.

I was there when Lady Pearl Logan confronted then Premier Borbidge. She said, ‘You will announce that medical school now.’ He said, ‘Yes, yes, yes—we’re going to do it.’ And she said: ‘No, you’re not “going to do it”; you’re doing it now. There are the media over there. You will go over there and make the announcement.’ She is a very persistent and forceful lady. That was at a National Party conference, and he was a little bit worried that Lady Logan was going to take the battle up to him in the public arena. So he called Mike Horan over, and they made the announcement. The rest, from the state government point of view, was history. I must say that the incoming Labor government agreed to the proposal. I do not want to leave out praise for the incoming Labor government in Queensland.

Added to this was Professor Bob Porter, a remarkable man. He is dean of a faculty at the University of Melbourne. He came up and gave very generously of his time and his life in spending those years up in Townsville. He put together the dynamics and the mechanics which we did not know or understand how to do. We had not had the experience of creating a medical school—I should not say ‘we’; I should say ‘Ian Wronski and his team’. Professor Bob Porter used his very great influence throughout the teaching institutions of Australia.

Another very great man, Ken McKinnon, was put up there because the university was having a lot of very serious troubles. He was brought in as the vice-chancellor to get us out of our troubles. In spite of all of the difficulties we had in putting that university together, he turned sideways with a great vengeance and a great commitment to deliver to the people of Northern Australia—the over a million of us who live up there—our own teaching institution where we could produce our own doctors.

I remember being the subject of a meeting of 12 politicians in Queensland who were deciding who would be the Deputy Premier. They decided that the criteria should be a person who is able to articulate their beliefs aggressively in the media, a person who has had a good performance in their ministry, and a person who is decent. Those were the three criteria that they put up. Without any false modesty, I must say that they were very wise in their choice at the time. I must also single out someone else for praise. Tony Abbott has taken us from 60 graduates a year to 150 graduates a year. In the scheme of things, when you look at it, what is important and what is not important? We were getting 60 doctors a year. We are chasing 2,500 doctors. I will leave it to you, Mr Deputy Speaker, to work out how long it was going to be before the problem was solved. He has taken us from 60 doctors a year to 150 doctors a year. We wish to deeply thank Tony Abbott as minister. He has also been one of the major driving forces behind seven new medical schools coming on stream throughout Australia to solve the problem across the board.

I do not wish to denigrate the other gender in any way—God bless the female graduates from our medical schools—but they decide to be mothers and they go into part-time practice of medicine. What happened was that we went from virtually 100 per cent male to 50 per cent female, and then a quarter of that 50 per cent became mothers and not full-time doctors. They practice, but for a very small number of hours compared with a full-time practising doctor. God bless them for it; we are not in any way criticising that. But the net result was that the number of doctors that we had dropped through the floor. In places like Northern Australia, we went from about 300,000 people to over one million people and we had absolutely no ability to put doctors on the ground to service those people. We come here today to pay a very deep debt of gratitude to all of those wonderful people whose names that I have mentioned. I must also mention Mary Jane Streeton. (Time expired)

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