Kevin Rudd (Griffith, Australian Labor Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Flynn for his question. The Australian government is committed to a strong economy protecting working families’ jobs—hundreds of thousands of them—and keeping this economy out of recession, unlike those other economies around the world which went into recession through the global financial crisis. This Australian government is also committed to delivering on basics for working families in education, in health and in hospitals. That is why the Australian government has put forward a new National Health and Hospitals Network, funded nationally, run locally and, for the first time in the history of Australia, with the Australian government taking the dominant funding role for the future of the public hospital system. It is for these reasons that, in the last three days, I have been in Sydney, Brisbane and Melbourne talking to the Premiers of New South Wales, Victoria and Queensland trying to forge a national agreement with the government’s plan, and that is why I will be heading to Western Australia before long as well—because those opposite had 12 years to act on the needs of our national health and hospital system and failed to do so.

For working families there is nothing more basic than having enough doctors, enough GPs and enough specialists. That is what the government is delivering through its policy today. Six in 10 Australians live in an area where there are shortages of available doctors. This applied when the now Leader of the Opposition, then Minister for Health and Ageing, occupied that position for four to five years. When we travel to regional Australia we hear time and time again right across the nation about the shortage of doctors, the shortage of GPs. I was told that doctors in rural Australia are caring for 137 more patients a year than their city counterparts. In some of our capital cities we have had comments emailed to the yourHealth website to say that a particular patient has had to wait for more than a week to get access to a GP—and that was from a patient in one of our capital cities. This is simply not good enough and the time for action has well and truly come. The government will be delivering more than 6,000 new GPs and medical specialists to deliver better health services and better hospitals for working families.

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