Sid Sidebottom (Braddon, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Mr Speaker, you and the minister at the table, the member for Gorton, have been occasional and very welcome visitors to the north-west coast of Tassie. Only last Wednesday we had the Prime Minister and many of his cabinet colleagues visit the Parklands High School in Burnie for the 23rd community cabinet. I thank Parklands High School for the tremendous job they did in preparation for the community cabinet, in particular Anne Walker, who is the principal and proudly a former student of mine, and Michael Czuplak, who went to so much trouble. I thank all the students, particularly the choir and orchestra, for the excellent welcome we received. I also thank all my colleagues who came down for the community cabinet, which was a very successful evening indeed with over 300 people in attendance on a beautiful autumn night.

Earlier in the day, the Prime Minister was at a civic reception at the Makers Workshop in Burnie, a facility that we had contributed $1 million towards. He then went next door to open the West Park sports precinct, where we had contributed $2.35 million. Indeed, we were able to remind our hosts from Burnie that some $50 million has been invested by this government in the Burnie region alone and we congratulated them for their co-investment in the many projects that we share.

Earlier in the day, the Prime Minister and the Minister for Health and Ageing, Nicola Roxon, turned the first sod for the $2.5 million Burnie GP Super Clinic. That is in addition to the $5 million Devonport GP Super Clinic, which is very well advanced and almost ready to be fully opened and operational. A major announcement was shared by the Prime Minister, the federal minister for health, Nicola Roxon, and our colleague, Michelle O’Byrne, the Tasmanian Minister for Health. We were very pleased to announce a $16.5 million partnered regional cancer centre to be located at the North West Regional Hospital. Our contribution is $4.78 million and that is part of a $48 million investment in additional cancer services for Tasmania, $24 million of which are Commonwealth funds.

The new facility will include the following: an MRI scanner, 12 chemotherapy chairs whereby 6,000 additional chemotherapy treatments will be performed, separate consulting rooms, a base for outreach palliative care, educational facilities for the Rural Clinical School and north-west GPs, as well as the community itself. Importantly, the building will be designed to accommodate a future bunker for the proposed north-west linear accelerator. So this is great news for the north-west coast and I hope it will go some way to easing the burden on those patients who have to travel for cancer treatment in particular. They will be able to have more of those treatments locally.

In addition, I was able to remind our electorate that $3 million has already been committed towards a new patient accommodation building in Burnie, with the building expected to start in the next six to 12 months. There is also another $10 million for the Tasmanian Patient Travel Assistance Scheme and we have also committed $180 million to the Mersey community hospital. All in all, this government has partnered with the region and with the state government on this major investment in health to service the north-west coast and the outlying regions. I thank the Prime Minister and the federal minister for health for this major investment and their support of the people of the north-west coast.