Rebekha Sharkie (Mayo, Centre Alliance) Share this | Hansard source

I rise, with respect to this address in reply, to talk about the needs of the Mayo community. In many cases, these are needs reflected more broadly across regional Australia. The first one I want to talk about is health—health, health, health!—in particular GPs and access to GPs, and then that elusive ability to see a GP and be bulk-billed.

Just yesterday, my daughter went to the doctor. She got sunburnt. I told her off. In fact, I warned her beforehand. I said, 'The sun's really hot. Make sure you absolutely cover yourself in sunscreen.' But sometimes 18-year-olds don't use their ears as well as they should. Anyway, she got quite sunburnt, so she went to the doctor. That's a good thing to do. The doctor saw her. The nurse also saw her. It's amazing to be able to get a GP appointment, because in many parts of my electorate it takes weeks. However, the bill was $165. My family can afford that. She said, 'Geez, I'm not going to do that again.' The thing is, while she says that, there are a lot of people who are also saying that and will go and use the emergency department simply because they cannot afford that bill. Yes, some of the money will come back. I think the out of pocket cost is just under $50.

I do remember standing in this place and hearing many people, who are now in government, when they were in opposition saying that the only thing you need to take to the doctor is your Medicare card. What we are seeing is an erosion of bulk-billing. I don't think there's anywhere in my electorate that bulk-bills. I'm hearing this from pensioners too. I'm hearing this from people who are on all sorts of Centrelink payments, that they are not being bulk-billed. The problem is that the pressure is happening on emergency departments or people are not going at all. Then we're seeing worse health outcomes.

Added to that, with respect to my doctors—I don't begrudge the doctors—some of my providers have closed. Others are saying they're facing huge losses with the cost of running a practice. One said to me they'd lost $90,000, I think, in the year to date. That's just not sustainable. We absolutely need to make this a priority. This is frontline health. This is the gatekeeper to more expensive health treatments, so we absolutely need to fix this.

What we have seen is that the issues around access to a GP, if you live in a regional area, have been made more difficult since the changes to where overseas doctors can practice. It used to be that an overseas doctor needed to practise in regional or remote Australia for a period of time. What we've seen though, with the changing of classification, is you can effectively, in South Australia, be living in Unley and service down at Noarlunga. You don't need to be in the regions. You could be living in North Adelaide and service Elizabeth. We have had contracts cancelled in my electorate, where we had overseas doctors not doing a stint in regional Australia. This is making the health outcomes for people who live in regional Australia worse.

I would urge the government to put the magnifying glass on this. If you are there to represent all of Australia, you will make sure that regional Australia has an equitable connection to the health system. I'm pleased to see that there's a task force report happening and that there's money flagged in the budget, but every day that we have people not accessing a doctor because it's just unaffordable to see a doctor is a day too long.

Other urgent health priorities in my electorate include addressing the funding shortfall for the Southern Fleurieu Health Service hospital upgrade at Victor Harbor, to meet the projected needs of the growing community. It's the oldest community, by median age, in South Australia, and one of the oldest in the nation. I think the median age across my south coast community is over 60 years of age, so our health needs are quite acute. There is also funding for the National Kidney Registry at the Flinders Medical Centre, which will obtain better data and drive improved health outcomes for patients.

I was able to get dialysis chairs into the Mount Barker hospital. Mount Barker is a very large and fast-growing area. It was hard to believe, when I was first elected, that we did not have any dialysis chairs at all in this region. People were travelling down to the city to have dialysis. I surveyed all the GPs in my electorate, asking, 'How great is the need?' They told me about patients who had said: 'Do you know what? It's just too difficult to do this drive. It's the tyranny of the distance.' So they elected to stop having dialysis and subsequently passed away. We're now at a point in Mount Barker where there's a wait list. We need to make sure that we get dialysis into the regions and to keep that up. We need to make sure we address the demand. This is a huge issue.

I'd also like to address another issue that's come to mind and which sits in the health spectrum: age-discriminatory rules under Medicare. If a person needs to have an MRI on their knee and they're over 50 years of age then a GP referral isn't enough to get the Medicare rebate and they have to go to a specialist. This sort of ingrained discrimination against older Australians needs to stop. We're putting barriers up to people accessing health care. If you're 49, you can get a GP referral and Medicare rebate—not a problem. If you're 51, it's a different story. I think that these arbitrary and discriminatory lines that we put in place are particularly unhelpful. Again, I've talked to many people in my community who cannot afford to get that MRI because they can't afford the gap.

I'd also like to talk about sport and recreation. I think that sport is very much the glue that holds our communities together. Not everybody is playing sport, but many people around the periphery are spectators, volunteers or join in for the social interaction. I note that many older people in my community spend their Saturday afternoons going to watch the local football. I love it: many of them sit in their cars—it's normally freezing cold—and then they get out, get themselves a drink and a meat pie, and go to spend some time in the stands. But we saw the whole sports rorts saga, which was incredibly disappointing. We actually had an infrastructure round that could have put money into areas of enormous need for sporting infrastructure across Australia. That was poorly managed—I think by everyone's standards—and rorted. But we haven't seen future rounds, and that's a real shame. When I look at so much of the infrastructure for sport in my community, it was built by volunteers in the fifties. It had a bit of renovation in the eighties or nineties, but it's no longer fit for purpose. In many places, we don't have mobility accessible bathrooms—a lot of our footy clubs certainly don't. And we've got lots of girls teams and we don't have anywhere for the girls to get changed.

Madam Deputy Speaker Ananda-Rajah, I don't know if you've spent much time in a locker room in a footy club, but it's got a certain aroma and a certain, you could say, 'ambience' to it! Perhaps that's not really conducive for women who also want to feel included in that scenario. We need to spend money on this. We recognise that sport assists our community so broadly, including with health and mental health, yet we don't put the resources behind that ageing infrastructure.

To name a few places, Strathalbyn and Districts Basketball Association has outgrown its existing single court—one court in a great big shed—and training is held off-site. New players are being turned away, and that could be the one thing that makes a young person feel so disconnected from their community. We are seeing regional competitions where we're not able to hold them or participate in them, because we just don't have the facilities. We desperately need, just for Strathalbyn, $8 million to develop a three-court venue. That's not a huge ask, and yet we don't have any grant rounds where we can put forward for that. With Willunga Netball Club, players are playing on ageing courts and injuring themselves. One million dollars would help redevelop those courts. Another example that really stands out to me is the Strathalbyn Strikers Soccer Club. They have two portaloos—the kind you see on a building site. That's what they have for all of their kids. This is the fastest-growing sport in my community. They have so many kids playing and taking it up. They don't even have sinks in thee portaloos. Players have nowhere to change. We really need to do better.

Many areas are experiencing huge growth. With the Aldinga region, we've just seen the state government announce that they're going to build more homes up to Sellicks, and yet that whole area does not have any sort of aquatic facility. When we're talking about aquatic facilities, we're talking about hydrotherapy, so, again, there's that link into health.

Going back to the Strathalbyn Strikers, we're not talking about a little club here, with two portaloos. We're talking about 200 players, and they're keen to host—and they do host—championships. Every time they hold those championships, they inject a couple of thousand dollars into the region. People stop at the local bakery, they stop and buy some food and they get some petrol. The club's facilities really do not match the standards that are expected. I'm aghast when I drive through the metropolitan area and I see their flashy facilities. It's extraordinary. They're beautiful. And we're dealing with portaloos.

I also would like to talk about the need for infrastructure in the regions, particularly in my electorate. The roads in the Adelaide Hills, in Mayo, are overrepresented in South Australia's crash statistics. Sadly, I read in a newspaper this morning that we lost another young person on our roads overnight. That family will never be the same. Four per cent of the state's population reside in the hills, yet we have five per cent of the fatalities and seven per cent of the serious injury crashes on our roads. In South Australia, we don't have a very large part of the federal road network, so we are underfunded when it comes to the funds that come in from the federal government towards our road network. I ask the government for $80 million to urgently address the black spot areas, road-widening corridors, ceiling shoulders, modifying embankments, removing road hazards, rehabilitating pavement and improving signage. These are just basic things we need.

Another significant infrastructure spend that we need is a new heavy rail corridor for our Hills. We have been talking about this for ages. We really need to get the freight network out of the hills. That will give us a corridor for some public transport. It's hard to believe that a community that will be over 50,000—that's just in the Mount Barker area, not looking at the broader area across the hills—has no rail. We used to have rail until the mid-eighties, when they decided that it was no longer necessary. There is no tram network. We talk in here about climate change and pollution, yet we're not putting in the infrastructure to allow people to change how they live their lives. We desperately need to have a train network again, or some sort of rail network.

On a positive note, though, I do live in the most beautiful electorate in Australia. We have been voted the happiest electorate in Australia—I think we still hold that title—and part of it is our beautiful scenery. We have a number of bike trails, but we need to connect it all together with the Adelaide Wine Capital Cycle Trail. That essentially will be a cycling pilgrimage across 250 kilometres. They have something like this in France, and it's a huge part of the tourism right across France. You can, essentially, cycle from one point of France to the other, entirely off-road, up and down, through all of the different regions. It's connected with the tourism there, so your bags get taken from one hotel to the other—it sounds very civilised. But we really need to have those visitors come up to the Adelaide Hills, down to the Fleurieu, across to Kangaroo Island—and I should really also say up from the Barossa; I no longer have the Barossa in my electorate, but I think that's what visitors expect. They want to see an experience, and we need to put that investment in.

Further afield, we regularly have 220,000 visitors per annum to Kangaroo Island, but in that area we have just over 5,600 rateable properties. A number of those belong to absent ratepayers, but they're servicing a $400 million road network asset. It puts enormous pressure on the whole of the Kangaroo Island community. I think Stokes Bay was just voted the best beach in Australia. We can't, on one hand, champion these locations and say how wonderful they are and then, with the other hand, not back them in with the resources and the funding that's needed.

One other infrastructure piece that needs to be done is the Victor Harbor Road, and not just the Victor Harbor Road, I might say, but the Mount Compass to Goolwa road also needs to be done. These roads, sadly, are overrepresented with respect to crashes. They are incredibly busy roads, and I urge the government to invest here. It's another area of my electorate that has very limited public transport. I think essentially one bus per day will go up to the city—or maybe a couple of buses per day. Many people call for the rail to extend all the way down to Victor. We need to make sure that we have accessible transport, particularly if they're also very fast-growing regions, as Victor Harbor is.

I'd like to close by talking about the Stronger Communities Program. I was really pleased to see that the Stronger Communities Program is currently open at the moment, and all of us are taking submissions for that. This program has been around, certainly, for all of the years that I've been a member of parliament, and it's a program that our whole community really looks forward to. I think one year I had about $1.5 million worth of applications for just $150,000 of grants. What you could do with $150,000 in your community back in 2016 was very different to what you can do with that now. So I would urge the government to perhaps look at increasing that, because with that program you get enormous bang for your buck, a huge amount of buy-in and in-kind support from communities, and really good grassroots projects. There's no money wasted when the money goes directly from the federal government to the community group. It doesn't waffle through some kind of state and local government puzzle, where money somehow seems to get lost. I would really encourage the government to look at this program with fresh eyes and perhaps to enlarge the program.

We need to make sure that we can also have those other great programs we've had in the past with respect to our school communities. That was another good one, very similar to this. In the year where many of our Soldiers Memorial Halls—which are particularly important in the regions—are turning a century old, why not have a further program to make sure that those beautiful 100-year-old buildings have a life for the next hundred years?

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