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

They interject with ‘When?’ For 12 years they had time to act on this—the government’s plan begins now. There is a serious shortage of doctors in Australia. According to the Department of Health and Ageing, to maintain current levels of GP and primary care services it is estimated that an additional 3,000 GPs will be needed over the course of the next decade. Furthermore, the Australian Medical Workforce Advisory Committee and the medical colleges indicate that there will be a shortage of around 1,280 specialists over the next decade as well. This sort of advice is not new. Honourable members may be interested to know what the Leader of the Opposition was advised of when he was minister for health in 2005. The Australian Medical Workforce Advisory Committee’s report ‘The general practice workforce in Australia: supply and requirements to 2013’ stated there will be:

… an annual requirement of between approximately 1,100 and 1,200 workforce entrants between 2007 and 2013. The current estimated entrants are in the range of 700 per year …

The House will be interested to know that was the advice that the Leader of the Opposition as minister for health received in the year 2005, but instead of responding to these warnings what did the Leader of the Opposition do? He froze GP training places at 600. The Labor government, in its two years in office, has acted already in these areas. We increased the number of GP training places in 2009 by 12 per cent. We have provided 600 more scholarships for doctors since 2007. We have also funded 1,134 new training places for nurses and from 2009 universities have offered an additional 1,094 undergraduate nursing places.

I say to the Leader of the Opposition, as he squirms in his seat over his appalling record on health and as a leader of the opposition who as minister for health has a very poor record to defend and, more importantly, has no plans for the future: what this government has done is to deliver $632 million to train an additional 6,000-plus doctors and specialists. This will double the number of GP training places to 1,200 a year. We will more than double the number of specialist training places to 850 places a year. This will deliver an additional 5½ thousand new or training general practitioners, 680 specialists and, through other reforms we have introduced, 5,400 prevocational places for training our next generation of doctors.

These are fundamental and big reforms for the future. I say to the Leader of the Opposition: on GP training places alone, we will be investing $339 million to increase GP training places to 1,200 students per year, starting with 900 per year from next year. We will be doubling the number of GP training places we inherited from when Tony Abbott was minister for health. This is a fundamental and basic change for the future.

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