David Gillespie (Lyne, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

This motion is a really important issue, or it speaks to a really important issue, and that is the health workforce. My many years of experience in the medical profession—in fact, 33 of them—were preceded by me working in the hospital system as a hospital cleaner, a central sterilising agent, a wardsman and a med student. I saw all sorts of hospitals in my training. I have seen multiple people, 18 beds in a row, down one side and 18 down the other side, with just curtains between and none of this private room rubbish—that was the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital that was built in the 1870s or 1880s and named after Prince Alfred who got shot by somebody when he came out here on a visit the 1860s—through to the Chris O'Brien centre, at the other end of the extreme, or St Vincents in Melbourne or Sydney.

The thing that makes the quality good is like with the F1. It's not the car; it's the driver. The health workforce is what makes Australia's health system great. Many places have Nobel prize winners, and Australia has plenty of them in our health workforce, but there's a uniform, high standard across Australia. Whereas with some countries it's all over the shop because they don't have a good health training system. A lot of them just get book knowledge. Anyone can be a doctor. You just go to uni and buy the books, and you get a medical degree. Germans and Italians used to come out here to get training as med students because they heard that we actually got to see patients.

But, Houston, we have a problem! Australia doesn't have enough of a health workforce in rural Australia—from pharmacists, physios and OTs through to doctors, nurses and whatever. Because of its roots, the National Party feels this acutely. It's more than what would be felt in Sydney. There's an overall shortage of GPs, as the member mentioned. In the Deans survey, only about 15 to 17 per cent of medical students now want to do general practice. When I graduated—about the same time as your husband, Member for Mallee, or a bit after—the figure was over 50 per cent. We've got specialists for the left toe, the right ankle and everything. There are square inches of the human anatomy that are looked after by only one specialist.

In a big city, you need about 10 doctors to look after a general medical patient; whereas, in the country, a generalist does it all. That's the beauty, because everything is connected—everything in the human body. We have been at the forefront of developing the rural health workforce. Unfortunately, due to the snakes and ladders of political life in this building, I wasn't there to announce the Stronger Rural Health Strategy. That fell to my successor, and I got put into children and families. But I do remember negotiating with University of Sydney, University of Melbourne, La Trobe uni, Monash University and getting medical schools created on the Sunshine Coast, because a wicked sandstone university was convinced to give up a lot of its extra places. So the people in the seats of Fairfax and Fisher have the Sunshine Coast medical school. The Queensland university at the tip of the point up there in Cairns and James Cook uni were beneficiary of the extra spots. We had Charles Sturt uni created. The National Party created that med school, because we got them a bunch of Commonwealth supported medical places, and we partnered them at the start with Western Sydney uni. Then I came back again with a second life in the health portfolio and got them a rural medical school, even though their school was rurally based.

Unfortunately, the member that was the beneficiary of that chose to sit on another part of the building, but there we go. We were just so pleased that we got it for people in country Australia, because they have been short-changed. Convincing Melbourne uni to give La Trobe students a pathway into a Melbourne uni degree was another stroke of genius, and I worked on that. I've been at the forefront of getting all these expansions. With the HECS debt relief for nurse practitioners who go remote, they get two years off for one—the same with doctors. The Stronger Rural Health Strategy is a really good example of that, but we need more pharmacists. We need more physios. We need everything, because it's the professionals that are important, not necessarily the buildings.

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