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

No, not locums. The doctors might be on close to $2,000 a day. If you have to have this huge unit of people being provided by suppliers in the system, one has to be very suspicious about this. With this sort of money going around and someone getting a percentage of it, there is reason to believe that it might influence the judgment of a lot of people. But if you replace these on-order people from private enterprise nurse and doctor supplying companies with employees, which was the situation 20 years ago, then clearly you overcome that problem.

I do not believe, as I have said to the Prime Minister, the Leader of the Opposition and the last Leader of the Opposition, that you can overcome these problems unless you go back to local hospital boards. If you have a hospital board in Cloncurry and one at Hughenden-Richmond, or Hughenden-Richmond-Julia Creek, as we had before, two hospital boards, those people live in that community. If there is no dentist there, when they go to their local Lions Club meeting or the local CWA meeting they might just get kicked to death. They are under terrific pressure to deliver a dentist. But if the decision maker is some sophisticated PR person living in Townsville or in Cairns then you are not going to get anyone who really cares whether there is a dentist out there in the mid-west or whether there is not. She is answerable to Brisbane and all Brisbane wants to know is has she cut costs. They do not ask about services.

In Queensland there is a government that is about to be annihilated in the forthcoming election—I do not believe it is unreasonable that they might not win a single seat, if you compare the polling with 1972. In actual fact they may not win a single seat in Queensland. You say, why? I will tell you why. We had a doctor that was killing people. Every single newspaper, every single person has called him Dr Death. And did they do anything about it when they found out about him? Yes, they did. They shredded all the evidence. That is what they did! They did not sack him, they did not replace him and they did not stand him down; they shredded the evidence! This is all a matter of public record. But if you do that and you think you can get away with that, well I have news for you. After my nearly 40 years in parliament I can tell you that you cannot if you treat the people with contempt.

The Treasurer in Queensland believed that you can amalgamate all the cities and shires in Queensland because it was very efficient. We did not understand it because we were simple country bumpkins; we would not understand the sophisticated knowledge that he had. This sophisticated knowledge is going to take his party into absolute oblivion in two months time, and quite rightly so. But we plead with the current government, and I must say that I was impressed with the fact that the current minister was on top of her game. I do not often run into ministers who are on top of their game. She understands. But I must say to the minister that understanding it is a long way from changing it, and at the present moment I am telling her that the health services in this country are down to Third World levels.

You have a person on the outskirts of Cairns who had to take their own teeth out. He told them that he was going to do it on Channel 9 and they still did not care! Is it any wonder that they are about to be annihilated in the forthcoming election? If you think you can treat the people with contempt, you cannot. We would plead with the minister to understand that you are not going to be able to reverse what is occurring with the shorter hospital boards. If a person in Richmond and a person on the outskirts of Cairns have to extract their own teeth you are living in conditions that even a Third World country would not be proud of.

We plead with the minister to take these things into account. She has inherited the proposal coming forward this evening. I disagree with it, and we hope that she will listen to and address the other aspects which we addressed tonight. (Time expired)

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