Bob Katter (Kennedy, Katter's Australian Party) Share this | Hansard source

Yes, I second the motion. It's not entirely germane to what we are proposing here, but there were three Katter boys—my father and his two brothers. Their parents had gone out to their region in a stagecoach in the 1870s. Two of the boys died as a result of the tyranny of distance. My uncle was injured in a football match—and this is where the story does not really pertain to doctors in the bush. By the time the Qantas aeroplane—and my grandfather was a major shareholder in those days—came back from Longreach to Cloncurry and then took him from Cloncurry to Brisbane, it was too late. Sadly, he died. If the aeroplane had been at Cloncurry, he'd have been alright. So he died as a result of the tyranny of distance. My father had cancer. He should have gone down for the operation, but the airline strike came. He wouldn't jump the queue and he was in no condition to drive down. By the time he got down there, 3½ months later, it was too late; the cancer had got away. So he also died as a result of the tyranny of distance.

There are people dying every day in Australia because there is no local doctor. The actual statistics that were done some years ago indicated that, where you've got a thousand people in a town without a doctor, there will be a death once a year. So there's an actual figure that we can put upon this.

The honourable member quite rightly pointed out, when he moved to call on this legislation, that—and I could not believe this—when the very special help was given to country areas to help them to attract doctors, that included Cairns! It's one of the most salubrious places in the world to live. And it's isolated? Heavens! If Cairns is isolated, God help the rest of Australia! The honourable member is pointing out that most of Sydney is in the same category as far western New South Wales. How can that be? The government, whatever government it was, with good intentions, moved the legislation, and some serious lobbying by vested interests got them to change the legislation. So the minister quite rightly brings his attention to bear upon this fact.

For six or seven years of my life, I carried the names of six doctors around with me because, every time we lost a doctor in Julia Creek, I would ring up England or, I don't know, America. There was a place in the Middle East where a doctor was available. He's a good bloke. I had six doctors overseas that I could call to come in because I was determined that Julia Creek would not be without a doctor. Julia Creek had over a thousand people in those days and now it's got very much under a thousand people. One of the reasons people leave is that there are no doctors there. Yes, they send a doctor out for four or five days a week from Mount Isa or Townsville or somewhere, but that's not having a doctor there.

In our day, though we didn't have many doctors coming through the Brisbane university, which was the only university in Queensland, those doctors were, for two years, bound to go where the government sent them if they wanted to become qualified to practise in Queensland. We should return to that. I wouldn't say for two years but I'd say for a year and a quarter. The government puts a million dollars into you. If you graduate as a doctor, the government has put a million dollars into making you a doctor, and it will give you the right to earn a squillion dollars a year. If you've got the right to practise as a doctor, you'll be a very rich person. If the government gives you that right and gives you a gift of a million dollars to get that right, then I think you owe something to the people of regional Australia.

I say regional Australia because it's not just the Julia Creeks that we're talking about here. We're talking about the Mareebas. Mareeba's only 30 kilometres from Cairns, yet their situation is grim. (Time expired)

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