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

I rise today to speak to the member for Aston's motion regarding Medicare. I relish the opportunity to highlight the significant ways Medicare is failing rural, regional and remote Australians under the Albanese government. Regional health is in crisis, particularly when it comes to workforce. A lack of workforce means everyday people cannot get the care they need in the right place or at the right time. An independently commissioned report published last year found a $6.55-billion-a-year deficit in healthcare spending for rural Australians. That is $848 per person per year not being spent on health care in the regions compared to the cities.

The gap is largely due to rural Australians' lack of access to primary care. It's not because rural people don't need the care; research shows very clearly that rural people live more years with illness or disability and die younger than their metropolitan counterparts. Life expectancy, for example, is highest in Sydney and lowest in outback Northern Territory, with a difference of 13.6 years for men and 12.7 years for women. This is outrageous. The Albanese Labor government should focus on rectifying the inequity in our regional health system, not maintaining their tunnel vision on voters in inner and outer metropolitan Australia and overinflating the success of their current policies.

The Albanese government's tunnel vision is illustrated by changes made to the distribution priority area in 2022. The ill-considered changes quickly resulted in movement of doctors from regional towns like Mildura and Horsham to larger inner regional cities or metropolitan cities. Labor's DPA change made the original health crisis worse, not better. I have called repeatedly for these changes to be reversed.

Another failing of this Labor government has been the introduction and rollout of urgent care clinics. These clinics are designed to help Labor state governments with overloaded emergency departments and failed primary care clinics. UCC's rob Peter to pay Paul by draining the workforce from private GP clinics to better-paid taxpayer funded positions in UCC's. The differential in pay and conditions between state funded health services and Medicare funded primary care is an ongoing issue in regional health, worsening workforce shortages around the country. The distribution of UCCs also favours Labor held electorates, with coalition held electorates in both cities and rural areas missing out. In fact, 66 per cent of all UCC's are in Labor held seats; who would imagine? UCC's outside the capital cities are highly skewed towards large regional centres such as Labor held Bendigo and Ballarat and of little benefit to people living in the large swathes of our country outside these areas.

This government has also hung its hat on the effectiveness of the changes to the rural bulk-billing incentive, yet Labor changes have been described as tinkering around the edges, given they only apply to children under 16 years and those with concession cards. Under Prime Minister Albanese, bulk-billing rates dropped from 88.8 per cent under the coalition in 2021 to 77.4 per cent for the year 2023-24. Hence, these changes have not met their aim of improving access to primary care.

As I said my maiden speech in 2019, a person's postcode should not determine their health status, but, for people in Mallee, it absolutely does. I thank doctors and health professionals in Mallee and in rural areas around the country for their dedication and hard work in providing high-quality health care to their communities. We must support our health workforce to do this often-thankless work by ensuring that regional health is high on the agenda and that Medicare funding for rural people is appropriate to the size and nature of the challenges experienced. Only a coalition government will be focused on the needs of people all over this wonderful country. Thank you.

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