Joel Fitzgibbon (Hunter, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

In my more than 25 years in this place representing the good people of the Hunter electorate, there have been issues which have stayed with me as a challenge for all of that period. Two really stand out.

The first issue is intergenerational unemployment. This is an area in which we've made some inroads, but I have a very strong view that we won't succeed in overcoming this issue until we have an education system that maximises intervention with children at the earliest age, preferably at the level of preschool, if not early child care. It remains my view that that intervention at the earliest possible age is critical with children who have never known their parents or grandparents to have worked, who have never woken up to an alarm clock—or seen others do so—and have certainly never worked to a routine and a schedule. These are people who are, effectively, born to be unemployed. The intervention of those wonderful people who work in early child care, preschool, kindergarten and primary school more generally will be very, very critical in achieving more success on that front.

The second issue is the shortage of GPs in many of the towns I represent or have represented. It's not quite as big a challenge to me these days because, with the 2015 redistribution, my electorate substantially shrank from 20,000 square kilometres to 10,000 square kilometres, excising from my electorate many of the more rural townships that found this such a difficult challenge. Alas, though, I still have challenges in townships. I was very pleased that, earlier this year, the minister agreed to provide DPA status, or distribution priority area status, to Muswellbrook LGA in my electorate, which is going to make an enormous difference to people in Muswellbrook, Denman and indeed, the township of Merriwa in the electorate of the member for New England. But what has been consistent, is the inadequacy of the system for all of that time. We don't have a GP shortage in New South Wales; we have a malapportionment of GPs, and—

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