Gary Hardgrave (Moreton, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I am very happy to do that. I am just finishing an illustration of a general point I am making about the pressure that is being applied to general practitioners, Medicare provider number holders, in my electorate by the sorts of difficulties that are being created by the bad decision making of the state government. The point is that on every core responsibility of state government—road infrastructure, water infrastructure, power infrastructure, rail infrastructure and medical infrastructure—the money is not being spent. So what are they spending it on? They are spending it on lots of TV ads telling people we live in a smart state, but not on ads that are being met by any sort of reality.

I pay tribute to the local general practitioners who operate under the Health Insurance Act. People now have a higher level of quality and a higher level of experience because of the deliberative measures of the federal government in 1996. Through the measures that we introduced in those years and the principled measures contained within the principal bill, we had put in place a biennial review. That is understandable because, when you change a system, you want the review process to occur less often once the system is operating better and with more experience than in the early days. This biennial review would be costing the taxpayers the best part of $200,000, take nine months to complete and take up the time of an enormous number of staff at the Department of Health and Ageing. The government has made the decision, after consultation, to change the biennial review to a five-year review. The member for Gellibrand was confused and amused but nevertheless supportive of the measure.

As to why the government would make these particular changes, it is simply that experience on this issue now counts and people understand what is required of them. Things are far better than they once were. We have made certain that all medical practitioners are now more appropriately skilled to enter into unsupervised general practice. In other words, we have created a system that is now working and, rather than constantly reviewing the review of the previous review and sucking up a couple of hundred thousand dollars every two years and taking a lot of departmental officers off other tasks, we are making it possible now for five-year reviews to occur. From my point of view, this is a very good, common-sense approach.

I will also say for the record that not only do we have more general practitioners with their Medicare provider numbers operating in my electorate than we have ever had before, and more of them bulk-billing than ever before; we have also got the effects of the innovations of this government now about to come on stream in a big way. The deliberate decision built around the efforts of the member for Herbert to create a school of tropical medicine means that doctors in training in Townsville will learn on the job in Townsville about tropical medicines and be more likely to stay in regional Australia. The fact that more medical places have been made available at institutions such as Griffith University, through its principal campus in my electorate and also its Gold Coast campus, means that more people are in training as well. The future, if you like, is not just simply about quality; it is about quantity.

Of course, the role of professionals coming from other countries is very important indeed. Of course, they are required to be adequately and properly trained and apply for Medicare provider numbers. Jayant Patel may have discredited the Queensland health system by his actions—the system failed to track his failings and too many people were hurt or killed as a result of that—but it is important to note that we should not target all doctors who have come from other parts of the world who may even look as though they are ethnically the same as Dr Patel. We need to understand that in gaining access to a Medicare provider number these people are people of quality. We demand that of them. State governments demand that of them. In my electorate, as a result of the very effective and community focused work of people like Dr Shabbir Hussein—he is a PhD, not a medical doctor, but his children are medical doctors—who came from southern Africa, a difference is being made. Dr Hussein is a Muslim man who is very proud to be in Australia. He has brought other doctors from that part of the world to also work in our local community.

We now have out-of-hours healthcare services based at Kuraby and Underwood—and I know that Dr Hussein has also put work into other places around the Gold Coast, 40 minutes south of me. Because of this man’s initiative, there are now Medicare provided services that operate until midnight most days of the week, and he is looking to set up 24-hour health care. These are the sorts of things that were only ever imagined years ago. As a result of the proactive and focused efforts of Minister Abbott and his department, we have been able to deliver that.

I will also mention Dr Madonna Abdella, a psychiatrist from the Philippines, and the creation of the Healthcare for All project, which is based at Acacia Ridge, just across the railway line from my electorate. They are providing an enormous amount of good for our community through the recruitment of overseas trained doctors to be employed as GPs in bulk-billing medical facilities throughout Queensland. I see that the member for Kennedy is here. He will be very interested to know what Dr Abdella is doing with this project. It involves the rotation of recruited overseas trained doctors through remote and regional areas, initially in Cunnamulla and Cape York—I am sure, Member for Kennedy, they are coming your way. Dr Abdella wants to rotate them through those far-flung parts of Queensland and then bring them back into the city to keep them well and truly trained and up to date.

This is the sort of initiative that is very much at the heart of why the government made the changes it did in 1996 and what this bill is about. These overseas trained doctors, employed in bulk-billing medical centres at Acacia Ridge, Toowong and other places, will also be providing 24-hour GP services in selected localities. This is going to make a difference when it comes to Aboriginal health. It is going to make a difference when it comes to general practice training programs—all funded by the Australian government.

I praise the work of Healthcare for All. It is a joint initiative of the Migrant and Workers Resource Centre and the Toowong Community Medical Centre, and I say well done to them. These things happen because we now have the acquisition of Medicare provider numbers on a far stronger and more stable footing. The quality is assured and the quantity is growing, and for those sorts of reasons the work of the government has been very important. But the work has not finished, and we are very determined to make sure that we continue to grow what we have already achieved to date. I thank the House, and I commend this bill to this place.

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