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

My electorate of Paterson is home to approximately 137,000 people. The health care for those people has deteriorated over the last 10 years. That is a fact. Last year, I met with the managers of local GP practices because the doctors couldn't spare the time to come and meet with me, such is the pressure for appointments. They had to send their practice managers, and, in fact, some of those practice managers were in tears describing the stress that they, and their GPs, are under.

The largest amount of correspondence I get in my inbox, by far, is about health care. Indeed, it's about trying to get an appointment at the doctors—and let's not even talk about specialists' appointments in rural and regional Australia. It is an abomination in this day and age to think that people have to wait years in some circumstances to see a specialist. What I have been hearing time and time again is that, in Australia at the moment, of all the people who graduate from medical school, about 12 per cent of them go into general practice. In the 1970s, roughly 50 per cent of people went into general medicine. Now, people are gravitating towards specialisations.

We will do more to encourage more people to go into generalist medicine. We need that, and we need those people to come to regional and rural Australia. In a place like beautiful Port Stephens, a lot of people come to retire—they often describe it, with tongue in cheek, as God's waiting room. Well, it is a magnificent part of the world, and we do have a lot of experienced Australians. However, a lot of people also want to come to Port Stephens to holiday. And, at times, our population there is fivefold what it normally is. This puts the medical profession in Port Stephens under immense pressure. Tomaree Hospital gets absolutely inundated, and not only over the summer; we're seeing more and more people coming to enjoy our whale-watching season in the winter.

Our GPs in Port Stephens are experienced, too. In fact, many of them have thought about retiring. But they just can't, because there isn't a replacement. That's why I am particularly pleased to talk about the course of action we have taken in, firstly, saying, 'You know what? A town like Kurri Kurri, in my electorate, or a town like Nelson Bay isn't the same as the CBD in Sydney. It is an area of need for medicine.' I'm pleased to say that our government has taken action to ensure that we can recruit doctors to places like beautiful Port Stephens and Kurri Kurri. The Medicare taskforce is going to review the bulk-billing rebates for local GPs. That's such an important thing, too, because we know it is now harder than ever to run a practice. And we need these practices to be able to be prosperous. We need to encourage people back into medicine.

We also know that creative recruitment and training of international and local doctors is so important in getting them to come to the bush, to seats like Paterson. The MRI licence at the Maitland Hospital is something else that I have campaigned on, and I am so delighted to say that an Albanese government is going to deliver an MRI licence for the Maitland Hospital MRI machine so that people can be bulk-billed when they need an all-important MRI for diagnosis.

Labor is always going to support Medicare, and we are always going to deliver for people when it comes to health care. We just absolutely fundamentally understand how important health care is, and we understand it in places like Paterson.

GP access is also one of the critical things that help to alleviate the pressure on emergency waiting rooms. No-one wants to sit in the ER with a sick child or relative and think, 'I'm going to be here for eight hours.' We're going to take the pressure off those ER waiting times because we know that people want that so desperately in regional and rural areas. There's a lot of work to do, but be assured, we are working with medical professionals to ensure better health for all Australians.

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