Rebekha Sharkie (Mayo, Centre Alliance) Share this | Hansard source

The regions bear a heavier burden of disease than any other part of Australia. Within my electorate, I have regional areas, rural areas and remote areas. Kangaroo Island is classified as a remote area. I am very conscious of the regional health inequity that exists in my community. So I am delighted to lend my support to the member for Mallee's motion and join her call asking for government and the minister to advance rural general pathways in medicine, nursing and allied health.

As well as significant staffing shortages in the regions and the tyranny of distance to access metropolitan services, those of us living in the regions receive less health spending per person. If you live in the regions, you are less likely to have affordable and timely access to a GP. You are less likely to have access to diagnostic services, such as regional breast care screening. If you need to see a cardiologist, you'll want to hope you live within 50 kilometres of the CBD.

Rural Australia produces at least 80 per cent of Australia's exports, 90 per cent of Australia's food—we feed the nation—and 50 per cent of our tourism revenue despite housing only a third of our population. Rural health care remains critically underfunded, and rural outcomes in our communities from a health perspective are vastly inferior. Rural areas have up to 50 per cent fewer health providers such as general practitioners, physiotherapists, psychologists, dentists—my goodness, how much do we love a dentist in the regions?—pharmacists, optometrists, and podiatrists than the major cities. In fact, remote communities bear 1.4 times the total disease burden compared to those in major cities and we receive less funding on a per capita basis despite that.

Analysis commissioned by the Rural Health Alliance shows that in 2020-21 there was a $6.5 billion gap in expenditure on health care in rural Australia compared to the cities. Expenditure and health services for a person living in rural Australia sits at $848 less per person per year than for their metropolitan counterpart. That's the difference between them, largely due to a lack of affordable health care in regional, rural and remote Australia. This equates to a gap of $6.55 billion between metro and rural areas.

I have previously raised some of these issues, including the closure of many rural general practices in my electorate. We are not the most remote. Kangaroo Island is remote, but many parts of Mayo are accessible within an hour and a half—of course, that's if you've got a car—from the metropolitan areas. But we are feeling it with the closure of GPs. Often it's because the GPs, with the changes the government's made, are able to now be reclassified, particularly if they're from overseas. They can work in places like Morphett Vale and live in Malvern. They can live in North Adelaide and go out to Elizabeth. That's how people from overseas can get around the system now, because they changed it from being MM 5 down to MM 2. What that means is that we've had a shrinkage of the workforce, particularly with our GPs.

As an aside, I'd also like to speak in support of the call by General Practice Registrars Australia for the GP workforce shortage to be addressed more generally. GPRA has asked government to fund an independent GP registrars employment fund, comprising a base rate wage, a supplement for first-year GP registrars, and independent GP training support. These are the kinds of initiatives we need. We need every avenue possible to get the smart country kids who go off and do their medical degrees back into the regions so they can work in the place they know. We desperately need them. If we don't have health services across our regions, people just can't live in the regions. And we need people in the regions, because otherwise the rest of us are going to starve. We in the regions grow the food, we grow the fibre—we support the nation—yet we are the country cousins. We are second-class citizens when it comes to health in this nation, and the government need to address this.

I thank the member for Mallee very much for her motion on this. We need to talk more about rural health in this place.

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