Kylea Tink (North Sydney, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

I want to start by acknowledging the record investment this government has made in the healthcare sector over the course of the last two years. It's welcome, and it's a strong indication that this government is both aware of and willing to engage in appropriate discussions that could potentially resuscitate our overstretched and flailing primary healthcare system. But today's MPI's not about that investment; it's about our system's inability to incentivise, retain and attract talented general practitioners, a challenge that faces so many communities across our country.

While I welcome this MPI and the fact it calls out the challenges faced by regional and rural communities, the truth is that my seat of North Sydney is not exempt. Recently I found myself speaking to my own GP about her frustrations with what she perceived as a persistent trend at the federal level of undervaluing general practice as an expertise. As she argued, GPs train for as long and as hard as any medical speciality and yet an hour of their time is deemed to be only worth somewhere around $170, while an orthopaedic surgeon can charge upwards of $2,500 for the same period. With Medicare rates falling behind and in many instances now considered almost disrespectful, bulk-billing rates are falling rapidly right across our country, with a recent survey of my electorate showing that, of the 54 GP clinics, only eight bulk-bill. That's 14 per cent.

Meanwhile, just this week, the AMA released figures showing that one in 10 patients in New South Wales leave emergency departments without completing their treatment, due to waiting times. The median waiting time between arriving at and leaving the emergency department at the Royal North Shore Hospital in my electorate has risen to four hours and 40 minutes, an hour longer than the state average of three hours and 38 minutes. The government tells us we should look to urgent care clinics to bridge both the GP and emergency care gap, but there isn't an urgent care clinic in my electorate. So what is my community to do?

Ultimately, I recognise the circumstance we find ourselves in is something that has taken decades to create. While we do feel it in the urban centres, I acknowledge the healthcare services of my youth in regional north-west New South Wales, where I grew up, are now actually unrecognisable. In the eighties, my hometown of Coonabarabran was a healthcare hub. We had several incredible GPs, including Dr Kerr and Dr Varley, who cared deeply for our community. They did it all, from delivering babies to setting broken bones. They stitched wounds and removed suspicious skin spots. They worked from both their rooms and a state-of-the-art regional hospital facility that was a centre of excellence for road trauma. We also had an incredible multi-vehicle ambulance service, which unfortunately my family actually had to rely on on several occasions.

Fast forward to today and, now, despite having an incredible local doctor, Dr Iannuzzi, my parents often talk to me of being unable to secure a walk-in appointment anymore and of women now having to travel to either Dubbo or Tamworth to have their babies. For me, the demise of services became incredibly stark when my children and I came across a road accident on our way home not that long ago to visit my folks. The accident involved two cars. It happened seconds before we rounded the same corner. Having grown up out there, I knew what to do. I pulled off to the side of the road, called 000, set my hazards to flashing and went to help. What followed, though, was a complete shock in terms of how long it took the police to respond, the lack of resources the police had and, indeed, the fact that the ambulance never showed up because that ambulance was actually carrying someone who was drunk and disorderly to Dubbo. There is only one ambulance in town these days. Instead, I was tasked with carrying one of the people involved in the accident into town in the front seat of my car.

Herein lies the rub: in an environment where our cities cannot keep pace with the housing demand and where one option will surely have to be for us to explore the option to encourage people to move to rural and regional Australia, how can we possibly make that argument when we cannot guarantee those people access to services that we should all fundamentally expect? It is time we fix our primary healthcare system, that we begin to decentralise it again and that we empower communities in regional and rural areas to be the healthy, thriving places and spaces they once were. It is a choice that our federal government makes every year when it continues to fund urban centres for healthcare provision rather than looking beyond that to true regional and rural community hubs.

I thank the member for Calare for bringing this really important matter of public importance to the House, and I encourage us to continue this debate until we find a reasonable solution.

See this speech in context