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

We have a situation where the culture of the health department in Queensland has got particularly bad. They are simply closing hospitals. They closed the Gordonvale hospital—they call it a hospital, but it provided none of the facilities of an ordinary hospital. We are very afraid that Babinda will also close. Moves have been initiated to close Atherton and Mareeba. An area with nearly 100,000 people will be left with no doctors. They will have to drive an hour down the road to Cairns to see a doctor, but that road is often closed during the wet season. It will be interesting to see what happens if the health department gets their way.

Minister, to a very large degree, I think your ministry will be decided on whether you overcome a problem that was created by, I think, the previous government—though maybe it was the Keating government. We always got first- or second-year doctors. They came to country centres where they got a wide range of experience and they fitted into the system very swiftly. They got very big incomes in these centres. Those doctors provided hospital treatment outside of the big capital cities. When the provider number was introduced it was not provided to a doctor unless he had spent two years in a major hospital, and that meant that our doctors who were going to the country areas were then not able to. They all had to go into the major hospitals, leaving us in a parlous situation. If you need any indicator of the failure of the former Deputy Prime Minister and the former Leader of the Nationals, Mr Vaile, you need only look to the big rally they had in his area and still nothing was done to overcome this problem. There has been a little bit done but very little.

The net result of that is that almost all of the doctors in the mid-west, gulf and Mount Isa are foreign doctors. We deeply appreciate them coming here and the work that they do. In fact, my own doctor in Charters Towers fits into this category and is a very excellent person in every way. But, by the same token, there is something terribly wrong with a country that cannot provide its own doctors—and the provider number is at the heart of this problem. We had the doctors there; now we do not. The problem that arose was the provider number. If you go to one of these country centres you will have a provider number whilst you are there but when you want to move out of those country centres you will not have a provider number—so you are two years behind the people who went to the city hospitals.

I represent the greatest number of aged-care facilities of any member in this place because, unfortunately, rural Australia is an ageing population. There are large demands put upon these aged-care facilities. There are places with only 20 or 30 employees who have had to employ another two or three people to meet audit requirements. They are not servicing the people who are in the aged-care facility; they are protecting the backsides of the public servants down here in Canberra. That is what is happening and that is the only purpose they are serving. It is simply a protective mechanism for people down here. When I have spoken to them, every one of my facilities has raised the issue of these huge administrative demands. In one facility there have been 10 audits—they call them support services—in a year. All of the senior people in the aged-care facility had to do nothing for a week whilst these people were sitting around doing nothing except protecting their own backsides.

The other phenomenon which I must bring to the attention of the House is that there are empty beds available in Brisbane but there are no beds in our areas. We have got a very great shortage. There is a great necessity to rebuild centres such as Mount Isa’s aged-care facility. It is 35 years old and was built in a most inappropriate manner in those days. These places need to be replaced—(Time expired)

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