Jamie Briggs (Mayo, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

The member for Shortland is garbling something. It is important that there be appropriate guidelines for scope of practice ensuring patient health and the economic viability of the PBS and the MBS. Referral rights for nurse practitioners to specialise may give rise to inefficiencies. Currently, GPs refer only a very small portion of patients to specialists and are best placed to make such decisions.

While highlighting some of these concerns, the coalition will not oppose this legislation. We firmly believe that GPs are the cornerstone of primary care in Australia and it is important that there is genuine collaboration between other health professionals and GPs in managing patient health care. That is a fair summary of our position, a position that the shadow minister has pursued with some vigour since he took on that role. It is a position which is important particularly in outer suburban and regional areas such as mine, where there is limited access for people to medical services in some cases. There has been a centralisation of health services over many years, and there are challenges for regional health across this country in ensuring that people have access to appropriate healthcare services for both preventative and reactive health care.

We in the opposition are supportive of the government looking at these issues, but we do think it is getting to a point where the government need to start taking some action to fulfil some of the promises they made—which is, of course, what they are meant to do. When it comes to healthcare services in Australia, when the government promise that the buck will stop with them and they do not fulfil that promise, people have every right to be disappointed. The realm of health services also includes the aged-care sector, which in my electorate and also across a range of electorates around the country faces significant challenges.

That brings me to the other and more contentious aspect of this legislation, which is at the other end of the healthcare services spectrum, and that is homebirth. I think it is a disgrace that the government have handled homebirth in the way they have in this legislation. They are reducing choices for women. Not long ago I actually wrote a blog for The Punch about the whole issue of birthing and government putting its nose where it is not welcome. I suspect that is the best way to describe it. My wife and I were fortunate, with both of our children, in having very safe and happy births. We used a private obstetrician for both of them, and the services were first class. It is always very saddening to hear about stories of births that do not go so well, and it is a credit to the medical profession that, in the modern day, the rates of infant mortality are so much lower than they used to be. However, as a parliament I think we need to realise that birthing is a very personal and individual experience. For my wife and I, it was a very deep experience with the babies, and I think it is dangerous when governments start to intervene and restrict how that experience can be conducted, and that is exactly what this legislation seeks to do.

On Friday, the Minister for Health and Ageing performed a backflip, and she is seemingly allowing two more years for consideration of the homebirthing issue. I suspect that it is more of a bureaucratic battle with the health department and insurance rather than the actual health aspects of homebirthing, given that state governments run homebirthing services already. I suspect it is more the insurance angle, rather than the health aspects, that the government is trying to grapple with. I think that creates a very unfortunate situation, where the government has tried to outlaw something—by putting a significant fine on it and therefore outlawing it—because, it appears, it is beyond their wit to deal with what is mainly an insurance issue. As I said in the blog that I wrote in The Punch, it is a very poor excuse to send something underground, which is in effect what will happen, because there are a group of people in our community, even though it is a small percentage—

See this speech in context