Meryl Swanson (Paterson, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

From January this year, the Morrison government and his Department of Health implemented the Modified Monash Model, which decides how much of an incentive doctors in regional areas receive to bulk-bill. This new scale is based on more contemporary data, which is a good thing, but in regional areas like mine they have fallen through the cracks. The electorate of Paterson has fallen through the cracks of this new data collection and Monash model. Unbelievably, areas like Port Stephens, Maitland and Kurri Kurri have been reclassified from regional to metropolitan.

I was born in Kurri Kurri Hospital, a thing that I'm incredibly proud of as no babies are born there anymore; they all go into Maitland Hospital, which is a superb hospital. How is it that my home town of Kurri Kurri, of about 6,000 people, is now classified as the same as Sydney—that enormous metropolis?

If you've ever been to Kurri, you'll know it is a beautiful place. We won tidy town of the year for the whole country. We have the most amazing murals. Bus loads of people come to Kurri to look at our enormous murals. The trick is you've got to be able to find the kookaburra in every mural. It's a wonderful town. We have the Kurri Kurri Nostalgia Festival, where we get hundreds of beautiful vintage cars. About 50,000 people come to our little town over a weekend to dance rock-and-roll, to wear their most beautiful full circular skirts and to crack out the Brylcreem. It is a wonderful, great place.

The sense of community in Kurri Kurri comes from the fact that it was the first planned town in Australia that was specifically built to support the mining communities and the pits that we had around the area.

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