Paul Neville (Hinkler, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

In typical Beattie government fashion, the spin-doctors have been out to try to justify the state government’s position on health. In recent days, Queensland’s print media has been inundated with half-page and full-page ads on behalf of the Beattie government—paid by the taxpayers, I might add—in an effort to try to shift the blame for the state’s decaying health system onto the Commonwealth. This is after Peter Beattie said he would take full responsibility for the state’s health system.

Let us look at the true situation. Since the coalition took office in 1996, Queensland’s population has increased by 21 per cent. Over the same time, the number of medical graduates in Queensland has increased by 25 per cent. By comparison, under the Hawke and Keating governments, between 1983 and 1995 Queensland’s population grew by 30 per cent. But, to the shame of those governments, over the same period the number of medical graduates decreased by 6.3 per cent.

Mr Beattie’s ads fail to take into account the vast increase in medical school intakes since the year 2000—notably, Mr Deputy Speaker Lindsay, in your own electorate. Since then, Queensland has gained three new medical schools—Griffith University, James Cook University and Bond—providing 160 publicly funded places. Alongside of that, the University of Queensland is turning out 243. So, as I speak, there are more than 400 publicly funded first-year medical students in Queensland universities, in addition to another 65 privately funded ones at Bond University.

The coalition is also working on getting more doctors into country areas. Only last week, I welcomed a group of 15 medical students to their third-year clinical studies in Bundaberg under the mentorship of Dr Denise Powell. We are also providing nursing and allied health scholarships to encourage young people to practise medicine in rural areas. Queensland will also reap more than $8 billion from the Commonwealth between 2003 and 2008 from the health agreement, which will fund about 50 per cent of the hospital system. On top of that, Queensland will receive more than $7½ billion in GST revenue this year.

Despite the record amount of Commonwealth funding going into his Treasury, Mr Beattie has chronically underfunded his own health system. For instance, according to the Productivity Commission, the Queensland government has spent just $440 per head of population on health since 2003-04, less than any other state. According to elective surgery figures released yesterday, the Beattie government is failing to reduce the length of waiting lists in public hospitals. The number of people waiting over 30 days for urgent category 1 operations, which includes cancer and heart procedures, increased by a massive 544 per cent in the last three months of last year compared with the same period 12 months earlier. In the same time frame, the number of people waiting more than 90 days for semi-elective surgery—category 2 operations, to treat things like severe pain, fractures, blocked arteries, some types of tumours, bowel conditions et cetera—increased by 281 per cent.

The current doctor shortage is a very difficult situation, but it does not justify the appalling culture of maladministration, secrecy and intimidation in the Queensland health department. It could not have come out more clearly than in the two royal commissions into the Bundaberg Base Hospital. However, events in Caboolture, just to the north of Brisbane, prove that nothing has changed: staff were threatened in the last fortnight with disciplinary action if they use the word ‘closure’ in respect of the failing emergency department at that hospital, which services the north-west corner of Brisbane. Queenslanders will only receive a good public health system, the one they deserve, once Mr Beattie gets serious about breaking down this entrenched culture of secrecy and maladministration.

Bob Katter (Kennedy, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I too have chosen to speak about the health crisis in Queensland. I said at question time yesterday, and I will repeat again here, that there are five major hospitals in Queensland whose emergency services are now officially declared unsafe. There are a further three that have been officially declared critical and possibly unsafe. This represents nearly one-third of the state population as being in the deepest of deep crises. The Gold Coast is not, Brisbane is not and Townsville is not, but, generalising, almost the entire rest of the state is. If you take out the Townsville area—some 150,000 from the million people living in the northern half of Queensland—then you have some picture as far as North Queensland and Northern Australia are concerned.

For the northern half of Queensland—and we are still chasing the figures for specialists, so I can only give the figure for outside the Townsville-Cairns city area—there is one doctor per 1,026 people. The average for Australia is one doctor per 358 people. This is not a situation in crisis; it is a situation collapsing. Mr Deputy Speaker Causley, you were probably the third-ranking minister in the New South Wales government for a number of years. Likewise I was a minister in the Queensland government. We both come from places where we ruled as part of a government. We are well aware that sometimes problems arise that cannot be solved. But in this case, if Mr Beattie went to England and waved around a $250,000 a year salary package, which quite frankly is well below what a lot of the doctors are now receiving in country centres in Queensland, he would be killed in the rush.

I am not speaking here about something that I do not know anything about. In fact, I have had to live with this sort of situation all of my life—for the last 32 years in parliament. There was another shocking case in Queensland—Mr Beattie’s malperformance is not new in the state of Queensland. It is abysmally worse than that of any predecessor, but it is not new. When I was state member for the state seat in North Queensland, the health department informed us officially that they could only find three doctors. They sent two officers overseas and they came back with three doctors. Dr David Harvey Sutton, who was our family doctor in the little tiny town of Cloncurry—3,000 people and a single doctor—went over to England and came back with 23 doctors. The Queensland government had a health budget at the time of about $2,000 million, and they could only find three doctors. This little GP operating in Cloncurry could find 23, and he put them on the ground. I can actually remember most of their names. I can reel them off.

Whilst we have had this problem for a long time, it is now qualitatively different. The whole of the health system in Queensland is simply collapsing. Mr Beattie and the Queensland government have now known this for some nine—arguably 15—months. And what have they done to address the problem? I am very much aware of the problem. Nearly 1,000 people turned up to the protest meeting in Mareeba, one of the big towns in my electorate, when the state government suggested that Mareeba Hospital be closed and we drive an hour up the road to Atherton if any of us get sick or have an emergency. That was the proposal put forward. Under terrific public pressure throughout all of Far North Queensland, the government backed down.

In my home town of Charters Towers, we have gone from 13 doctors at the start of last year down to seven doctors now. The mayor from Cloncurry, the midwest town, came to see me here at Parliament House. He had won a national prize. He came in to address me and say that the situation in the western centres is absolutely critical. (Time expired)