Ms Catherine King (Ballarat, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Minister for Health and Ageing. What has been the response from stakeholders in the broader community to the government’s plan to train a record number of doctors?

Nicola Roxon (Gellibrand, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Health and Ageing) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Ballarat for her question. She always has a strong interest in this as her electorate of Ballarat does have a number of shortages, as do the electorates of many people in this House, which we unfortunately inherited from the previous government. When a person known to everyone in this House was the health minister, 74 per cent of the country was suffering a shortage of doctors and 60 per cent of the population were affected by that shortage. So of course the announcement made yesterday would be welcome news for many people in the community.

I must admit that I have not seen any welcoming comments from those opposite. Unlike the member for Ballarat, who is clearly interested in what this announcement can deliver for her electorate, I do wonder whether the member for Dickson—I know parts of his electorate are areas with workforce shortage but I think he is too busy tweeting at the moment to be able to consider his constituents—is going to advocate or oppose funding that will go towards more doctors in his electorate. I know the member for Cowper has had a very keen interest in the shortage of doctors in his electorate and I imagine that as a leader in the National Party he will be advocating to Mr Abbott that they should be supporting this plan.

There are plenty of other examples—whether we look at a town like Yea in McEwen, whether we look down to Port Macquarie or whether we look at a range of other electorates. When you have 60 per cent of the population affected by a shortage that was ignored time after time by the Leader of the Opposition, is it any wonder that you have very strong praise from the AMA, the College of General Practitioners, the students, the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons and the Australian and New Zealand College of Anaesthetists welcoming this as an important step forward?

I wanted to also flag for people’s attention the comment that the Prime Minister has mentioned—that is, that Mr Abbott has said: ‘Really, everything was running pretty well in our health system when I was the minister, except for our public hospitals—just this minor issue that we were going to turn our minds to next.’ But I would like to remind the Leader of the Opposition, who was the health minister, that to assert that the federally run parts of our health system were working pretty well under the Howard government when 74 per cent of the country were suffering from a workforce shortage is just to show how blind the Leader of the Opposition remains to this problem.

He did not see it as a problem when he was in government and he still does not see it as a problem. That is why he has not come out and welcomed these investments. He has not acknowledged that there are already more doctors being trained because his cap was removed by us when we were elected to government. He has not had the decency to acknowledge that this is a problem that he failed to fix and that we are now taking action to fix. It was not because he did not know about it. As the Prime Minister said, there were 31 different warnings, seven of them on the shortage of doctors, and these were just public warnings and public reports. I am sure he was urged time after time in private meetings to take action, as we have been urged to and as we have been doing.

For the benefit of the House, and given that the Leader of the Opposition allowed all of these problems to fall on deaf ears when he was the health minister, I might also report to the House that just moments before coming into question time the other place finally agreed to pass the Health Legislation Amendment (Midwives and Nurse Practitioners) Bill 2009. It is a vital reform to our health system that has been opposed by those opposite. Finally, they have conceded that this is an important and historic occasion for nurses and midwives and will be welcomed. I report it to the House because it reflects exactly the same approach taken by the opposition to the problems that were raised with this shortage of doctors. As I say, those opposite could not quite bring themselves to support the package but they did concede that they would not oppose the package. Finally, one of the Liberal senators gave the game away and said with a sigh, ‘This is better than nothing,’ and nothing is what Mr Abbott obviously gave everybody else.