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

I thank the honourable member for Braddon for his question, because, having visited his electorate on a number of occasions, I know that one of the top priorities in that part of Tasmania is the proper delivery of health and hospital services to his community. What I find right across the country is that people are crying out for national leadership to improve the health and hospital services of the nation, so that working families can have confidence in the level of services delivered by their local health professionals.

That is why the government has put forward its plan for a National Health and Hospitals Network, one which is funded nationally, one which is run locally and, for the first time, one where the Australian government takes on the dominant funding responsibility for the public hospital system of Australia; the dominant funding responsibility for its recurrent costs; the dominant funding responsibility for its capital costs—that is, the building of new hospitals; the dominant funding responsibility for equipment costs—for example, operating theatres and the most expensive of the investigatory and diagnostic machinery that you see in modern hospitals today; and also, for the first time, the dominant responsibility for the teaching and training costs associated with hospitals as well.

This morning, together with the health minister, I met GPs in training and medical students at the annual conference of the General Practice Students Network. It was here in the Great Hall in Parliament House. It was a great opportunity to be able to talk for a while with those young medical graduates about their future careers, possibly as GPs, and what they are doing is benefiting from support provided by government at present. But, most critically, what they are concerned about is their futures, as well—whether there will be enough GP training places in the community. That is why a couple of days ago the government announced its new plan for a record investment in the expansion of GP and medical specialist training places right across Australia. We are investing in 6,000 additional training places for doctors—for GPs and specialists—right across Australia. We need to act in this area, since we have been advised that, with the shortage of doctors in the decade ahead, simply to maintain things as they are would require an additional 3,000 GPs, but if we are to improve the level of services then we have to do much better than that. That is why within the program I have just referred to we are investing in support of 5½ thousand new GP training places. This will cost the government some $632 million, but we believe that this is an important program to get on with.

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