Bob Katter (Kennedy, Katter's Australian Party) Share this | Hansard source

I spent my years in the state parliament carrying six doctors' names with me in my briefcase wherever I went. That's because we were constantly without doctors and I was constantly chasing doctors all over the world, mostly in England, to try and get them to come to our outback outposts—our mid-west towns, as we call them, and our towns in North Queensland.

To show you how greatly valued these people are, if you drive into Charleville, there is a big statue to Dr Ariotti—a very outstanding Christian man, I might add. I think that had a lot to do with the self-sacrificing nature. If you drive into Cloncurry, Father Dr David Harvey-Sutton, who was a priest in the Anglican Church—again, the highway into Cloncurry is named after him. This is how important these people have been to our communities.

But I have had to face up to this problem. We called a meeting to get a medical school built. We called that meeting for eight years continuously. We got it eventually, thanks to an outstanding person of the Jewish faith who established the medical school. I'm very proud to say that my daughter, Mary-Jane Katter Streeton, got the credit, but I think that doctor, Professor Wronski—and she would agree—deserved most of that credit. We got the first medical school built in 44 years in Australia. Now there are something like 19 medical schools that have walked through the door that we have opened, and the situation is worse now than it was before those medical schools came in. I've heard two speakers tonight say that 70 per cent went into general practice, presumably a lot of them in regional areas, and now that figure is down to 10 or 20 per cent. Two speakers have referred to that. Therein lies the problem.

I don't think there's any way out of this problem except to go back to what the much-maligned Bjelke-Petersen government had in place. I just look back and think, 'Were we really that good?' Yes, we were! If you became a medical graduate, you had to spend two years doing a practice wherever the government sent you. That was part of the deal. You could not practice as a doctor in Queensland without doing those two years. I think there's only one way to deal with this problem, and that is to go back to 1½ years compulsory at the direction of the government. You'll be sent wherever they send you. And, really, if you're sent to an outpost like Richmond or Julia Creek on your own Shanks's pony, you've got to make the decisions yourself. I think that's important in the development of a GP.

As to the answer of bringing people from overseas, I personally have had the rather unnerving experience of having pains in the chest. Three doctors from overseas looked at me at the hospital. It was a long time ago now. They said that there was nothing wrong with me and sent me home twice. The ambulance man just rushed me straight through to Townsville. He didn't worry about what the doctors said. I was having a massive heart attack, and three foreign doctors didn't pick it up! I was rushed into emergency surgery. So, for some of these doctors that have degrees from overseas, they are not degrees as we understand it here in Australia. Some of them, on the other hand, are very excellent. I pay great tribute to Mo Diqer, who did the operation and restored me to extremely good health. He was an outstanding man in every respect. He died recently in North Queensland.

In summary, the answer to the problems outlined by the speakers—and I think there have been very excellent contributions made by the speakers; I very rarely hear as good a contribution as I've heard tonight—will have to lie in compulsory 1½ years. If you're going to get a job that's going to pay you half a million a year, surely you owe something to the people of Australia. No-one complained about the two years. I never got a single complaint in my years in the state parliament about the two years. In fact, I think most of them really enjoyed it. But we have to make the 1½ years compulsory. We have to do that, or the situation is going to get worse and worse, bad as it is.

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