Anne Webster (Mallee, National Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Regional Health) Share this | Hansard source

In seconding this excellent motion by my colleague from Wide Bay, I do so as the shadow assistant minister for regional health and speak on behalf of the women of rural, regional and remote Australia who are victims of Labor's scorched earth approach to regional Australia. Talking about choice: many women face having to be away for the last six weeks or more of their pregnancy to ensure they can have a safe delivery. That is not to mention the strain the mothers' absence places mentally, emotionally and financially on her other children, on her partner, on her family and on her family business, such as the family farm. Fathers risk missing the birth of their child. If mothers remain at home, they risk having their baby outside a safe place for delivery.

In Blackall, Queensland the ABC reported in November that 20 women from the town with a population of 1½ thousand had given birth last calendar year, but none had been able to do so at their local non-birthing hospital. Mothers are expected to travel 200 kilometres away to Longreach or further afield. Reportedly, only seven of those women had their baby in Longreach and presumably gave birth even further away.

Epworth HealthCare in Geelong scheduled the closure of their maternity service in March last year. At one stage, St John of God Geelong Hospital was also facing being on bypass due, in part, to a lack of paediatricians in the area. A Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists spokesperson said in August that services in the greater Geelong region haven't kept pace with an increasing population, saying, 'The college is aware that St John of God Geelong Hospital and University Hospital Geelong have, at times over the last few months, been on bypass for maternity patients and babies and have needed to transfer patients for whom they would ordinarily be able to provide care.'

It doesn't stop. In Whyalla, South Australia, the hospital was hit with a sudden closure of birthing services a year ago, requiring women to go a 76-kilometre additional distance to Port Augusta or, in some cases, almost 400 kilometres further, to Adelaide. Port Lincoln hospital does not have a full-time paediatrician, resulting in some mothers facing a 600-kilometre-plus trip to Adelaide to have their baby. Gladstone Hospital in Queensland was on bypass for over 11 months until last June, as had been both Biloela and Beaudesert hospitals that year. The absence of services in Gladstone and Biloela put additional pressure on Rockhampton's hospital birthing services. Also in Queensland, Innisfail, Mareeba, Ingham, Ayr and Dalby hospitals all had to suspend their birthing services for a few hours to several days in a 13-month period to last May. Imagine that on your last check-up. The situation was so bad that Queensland started offering $40,000 for GPs to train in obstetrics and offered interstate and overseas workers $70,000 to live in regional Queensland.

I turn now to a potential solution. A recently published study by Notre Dame university confirms that exposing doctors to rural practice in their early years, before they've made big decisions about marriage, mortgages and family, is crucial to keeping medics in the bush. The research followed 1,220 medical graduates from nine Australian universities to track where they were working five, eight and 10 years after graduation. General practitioner doctors were nearly three times more likely to be practising outside the cities after a decade, as the specialty has greater rural training opportunities. The majority, 71 per cent, of GPs who were in rural areas five years after graduation remained there at 10 years. This month, the Land newspaper profiled Dr Clare Hardie, a GP-obstetrician who was doing a clinical placement in Narrogin in Western Australia's Wheatbelt in 2015 when, in her own words, 'I met a fella who is going to live rurally for the rest of his life, so I guess I'm stuck in Narrogin.'

In conclusion, rural, regional and remote Australians, particularly women, deserve better from their government. As the election approaches, I look forward to sharing policies to move swiftly to give regional Australians the health care they deserve.

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