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

In my 33 years, or whatever it is that I have been a member of parliament, and in my 62 years on the planet in my homeland—which is the mid-west area of North Queensland, the area between the Mount Isa badlands, if you like, the mineralised areas, and the coast—we have always had a dentist in Cloncurry and a dentist in Hughenden. And in my time as a member of parliament for the area we have always had at least one dentist to cover Julia Creek and Richmond. So there have always been at the very least three dentists on the ground in that area.

I cannot remember whether it was last year or the year before—but it certainly went into last year—when we had not a single dentist covering those 10,000 people. Since Hughenden is almost 300 kilometres away from Charters Towers, people in Hughenden would have to travel a 500-kilometre round trip to see the nearest dentist. As for Cloncurry, it is 110 or 120 kilometres to Mount Isa, and people would be looking at a 250-kilometre round trip—most certainly over a 200-kilometre round trip—to Mount Isa to go to a dentist.

This has never been the case before. The money market of course is always a good indicator and I was told the other day by a very authoritative person that a new doctor starting up in Mount Isa gets paid $125,000; a new dentist starting up in Mount Isa gets paid $230,000—and this represents the desperate shortages that we have in Northern Australia.

As the honourable member for Herbert will tell you, there are nearly one million people living in North Queensland, and we quite rightly will take out the premiership in the NRL and so we should. We are an area on the rise. We are moving forward with great aggression, in population and on every other front. Per head of population, we have maybe a quarter the number of dentists that the rest of Australia has. Our situation with doctors is that—and I do not want to be quoted on the figures—where the rest of Australia have one doctor per 400 people, in North Queensland we have one doctor per 2½ thousand people. That is a huge difference.

We thank this government very much. We thank the coalition government of Queensland and also the subsequent Labor government for assisting us to get the medical school in Townsville at James Cook University, the first medical school in some 44 years. We acknowledge the hard work of the member for Herbert. I had the privilege of forming the committee which  subsequently secured the medical school.

While in four years time we will have 150 doctors coming on stream each year—and this will address the lack of doctors in North Queensland—it will be a decade before we really come to grips with the problem. With dentistry, we have no answer at all. All of us at one time or another have been beaten down with a terrible toothache. That certainly is terrible, particularly when you get it on Friday night and you cannot get to a dentist until Monday. A lot of these people do not have vehicles and they most certainly do not have the money to jump on a bus—buses are not all that frequent through the area anyway—to go to the coast or near to the coast to get dental attention.

So our situation in dentistry is diabolical and the necessity for a dental school in North Queensland is an absolute imperative. Once again, paying very great tribute to that wonderful Executive Dean of Medicine, Health and Molecular Science at James Cook University, Dr Ian Wronski, one of the giants of the profession in Australia and one of the great giants of all time of rural medicine in Australia, we would urge the government to listen to Ian on the issue of the absolute necessity for a dental school in northern Australia. Nearly one million of us live in North Queensland and we have to send our sons and our daughters down to Brisbane to become dentists. The chances of them coming back to North Queensland are very small indeed. So we plead with the government to act just as they did in the case of the JCU medical school—and we thank them for that—to act similarly in the area of dentistry.

We must add to this the situation concerning the elderly, which was referred to by my honourable colleague from New England. There are difficulties, which I have referred to previously, for a person living in the mid-west region or even living in substantial towns on the coast and on the Atherton Tableland, trying to get in to see a dentist—it is like trying to win the casket in these situations. In fact, on a number of occasions my own office simply could not get appointments anywhere within the space of weeks—including in the coastal towns of Innisfail and the Atherton Tableland area, as well as Charters Towers and Mount Isa. So we have had our dentistry done in Canberra because it is the only place we could get in. It is infinitely more difficult for our elder citizens (a) to afford it and (b) to physically secure it. So there are myriad problems of distance, isolation, the cost of the actual medical care and also getting to where the medical care can be provided. We are looking at 150 bucks for a round trip in a bus from Hughenden to Charters Towers to see the dentist—an older person is looking at $150 on the cost of the dental problem.

In Normanton, we have had enormous difficulties. There were a couple of notorious cases where the dental problem became a very serious health problem. In one case it overlapped and was attributed to cancer, which I did not think was a medical reality, but we were assured by the doctors that it was, because the issue had been left completely neglected and it may well have been that it was cancer in the first place. A dentist would have picked it up but of course that person had no dental care whatsoever. They were waiting for the dentist to arrive two or three months later. It was about six months by the time he got to see the dentist and it was too late to save him.

We applaud what the government are doing here, but we plead with them to look at the real problem for our older citizens, even if they are in big cities. The northern beaches area of Townsville is a classic case in point where it is very difficult for people, retirees in the main, to get back to Townsville for dental care. Even though they are only two hours drive away, many of them are not of an age where they are able to drive any more. Many of them do not have cars and have to rely upon relatives or the generosity of neighbours to get them back to Townsville. But there is no way that, if we have a northern medical school, dentists will not be moving into areas such as the northern beaches area of Townsville. They will have to go there because they cannot all sit on their seats in Townsville; they will move into other areas.

We plead with the government to look at the very serious nature of this problem. We call ourselves a developed country but, in fact, when I was a young man, we had an aid program—I am trying desperately to think of the name but it is not coming to me—whereby we brought people out to Australia from developing countries in Africa and Asia and paid for their training here as doctors, dentists or as members of other professions, and they went home to practise in their own countries. Eighteen of the 28 doctors in the mid-west—Mount Isa and the Gulf Country—were not from Australia; they were from Africa and Asia. So, whereas when I was a young man we used to train their people in our country, they now have to train people to provide us with doctors and dentists.

The last time I did the figures, 18 of the 28 doctors fell into that category. A lot of them have enormous difficulties communicating in English but it is not their fault. In some cases their degrees are very deficient; in other cases their degrees, I am informed, are better than our degrees. Be that as it may, there is something dreadfully wrong with a country that cannot supply its own dentists and doctors. If Australian cities have shortages of doctors and dentists and difficulties with supplying those services, those shortages and difficulties in country Australia are infinitely worse. For the near million of us who live in North Queensland, with the nearest dental school 2,000 kilometres away, it simply is not possible for us to get those dentists to come back and practise in North Queensland. No matter how beautiful and paradisiacal North Queensland is, we still cannot entice them back. We plead with the government to realise that Ian Wronski is right. There absolutely must be a dental school in Northern Australia for the exact same reasons there had to be a medical school there.

I conclude on this note. When I spoke to Mike Horan, who was a minister in Queensland, he said, ‘Look, Bob, the answer can only be provided by a North Queensland medical school.’ I said, ‘I absolutely agree.’ I also spoke to Michael Wooldridge, whom I often called the ‘angel of the bush’—and, because he did so much for rural medicine in Australia, I think he deserves that title. Michael Wooldridge said, ‘The problem for Australia would be solved substantially by having a medical school in Townsville because at least 40 per cent of this problem of doctor shortage is a Queensland problem.’ He said that it was a problem to a lesser extent in rural Victoria and rural New South Wales and not so much a problem in Western Australia and South Australia. I do not know whether that was true, but both of those ministers at that time agreed that the solution to the problem of the shortage of doctors in rural Australia would be substantially solved by putting a medical school in Townsville. Exactly the same arguments apply to dentistry.

The situation is—I will use myself as an example—that my office in North Queensland simply could not get me an appointment and had to make one here in Canberra. We plead with the government to take those things into consideration. An election is coming up and we would like some sort of commitment to having a dental hospital in Northern Australia. The government still has time to do it and to be applauded for doing it. As I stand here today, applauding Michael Wooldridge as the angel of the bush, I would like to be able to say the same thing about our current Minister for Health and Ageing, Mr Abbott. I give him the opportunity of doing that before the government ceases to be the government in the sense that there will be an election.

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