Brian Mitchell (Lyons, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I, too, would like to thank the member for Indi for moving this matter of public importance. It's refreshing to get a matter of public importance that indeed lives up to the name. There are few things more important than the urgent need to respond to severe health workforce shortages across Australia, particularly regional and rural Australia. By my count, we've had six speakers on this motion who are former health professionals, serving health professionals or health administrators. In the parliament we've got at least eight to 10 former health professionals. I'd make the suggestion to all those people on this side, the other side, the crossbench and in the Senate: get yourselves together, form a little caucus and come up with some real solutions. From what we're hearing today, the issues have been really well articulated and we know what the issues are; it's about finding the solutions. We can all say, 'Let's just chuck money at it,' but we know that the bucket is finite, so let's find solutions that don't require billions and billions of extra dollars.

The Albanese government, since coming into office, recognises—in fact the health minister has said that the GP shortage is one of the single most pressing issues facing the health sector today. We've announced a range of issues which go, as the member for Higgins mentioned, directly to workforce. We're not focusing on capital infrastructure; we're focusing on human infrastructure to try and get people out into the regions, whether it's the Northern Territory, across the vast inland plains or elsewhere.

We've committed $15 million towards upgrading the Royal Flying Doctor Service headquarters at Launceston Airport in the north of my electorate. They do amazing work. They should look at rebranding themselves as the 'royal driving doctor service', because they are doing a lot more driving than flying at the moment in my electorate. They've got mobile vans—in fact they're fully equipped clinics—which go out to aged-care homes and to more remote areas of my electorate and deliver amazing health services. I think that's a model that we should be looking at.

We're looking at a number of models in my electorate. There are few things more pressing for me as the local member for Lyons than the workforce issue with primary health care. I don't want to just say there's a GP shortage. That minimises it. The member for Kooyong alluded to this quite well. It goes across the health spectrum—nurses, psychiatrists, all sorts of allied health professionals. We face a workforce shortage in health in the regions.

We're looking at a number of things. I've set up, in my electorate, a primary healthcare committee that draws on the expertise of people in the primary health network, consumers and other stakeholders, including local and state government representatives. We get together to develop a plan of action to tackle the shortage of primary health care across regional Tasmania. Little bushfires of crises pop up from time to time, and we try and deal with those. I must say, there's a lot of goodwill. I'd like to thank the Tasmanian Liberal government, on that note. We are a federal Labor government. We're working hand in hand with the Tasmanian Liberal government to find solutions, and there's been a lot of goodwill across the aisle.

We're dealing with a lot of issues, in my electorate, in terms of GPs leaving clinics. The member for Fowler has mentioned a similar situation in her electorate. I think every member, particularly every regional member, in this House would have similar stories about the difficulty of retaining GPs let alone recruiting them.

I come at this, maybe, from left field. To me, health care is about three things. It's about staying well and healthy. If you're not well or healthy, then you need to be treated. If you can't be treated, then you should be made comfortable. We've got away from those foundations. We've made it incredibly complex over generations. The bureaucracy has grown and we've put on bandaid after bandaid after bandaid. We need to rip it away and make some really deep structural reforms. But it's difficult to make structural reform when you're in a constant state of triage, just trying to keep the system going.

That's where we need to get to, and I applaud the efforts of the health minister and his supportive team in making sure that we get to this. Strengthening Medicare is part of it. We believe in Medicare. We want to protect Medicare. We want to make sure that it's there for all Australians.

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