Tony Crook (O'Connor, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Minister for Health and Ageing. With many local governments in regional Australia carrying the increasing financial burden of general practice doctor provision, would the minister please inform the House of the government’s plan to address this issue?

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

I thank the member for O’Connor for his first question and congratulate him on his first speech, which he gave earlier today. Anyone who heard that speech would know that this question comes from a very real concern about the plight and the lack of doctors in his electorate. I know that there are many on the other side of this House, and on ours, in whose electorates there is a severe shortage of doctors and that it is causing significant problems across the country. This question comes from the member for O’Connor, who has dedicated a lot of his adult life to volunteering for the Royal Flying Doctor Service, and I am sure we will have a lot of time together to work out ways to solve what is a very serious problem.

But I can tell the member for O’Connor some good news. In this financial year, targeted rural health funding—this is for targeted rural health programs—in addition to what is paid under any of your general entitlements programs is now at $795 million. Had the member asked this question of the Leader of the Opposition in his last year as the health minister, he would know that this is a 65 per cent increase on targeted rural health expenditure that is already flowing out into the community. This includes other investments such as the $134 million Rural Health Workforce Strategy that we announced in the 2009 budget, which means that 500 more communities and 2½ thousand doctors are newly eligible for incentives. So, in the very many areas in O’Connor that are classified RA5, new relocation incentives of $120,000 are payable to GPs who move to these communities, and there are retention incentives that have been significantly increased for those who stay in those communities, of $47,000. These are significant changes.

The member might also be interested to know—and I know that a number of other members from Western Australia have raised the issue of the number of GPs in Western Australia—that already serving are an additional 30 GPs being trained because of the investments our government made when we were first elected to office. We have since committed that we will increase those places even further, so that over the next decade there are going to be 5,500 extra GPs. I think all of us in this House need to work to ensure that those GPs go to communities where they are needed and go into practices where they are needed.

The member might also be interested that just a fortnight ago the Prime Minister and I announced the latest investments in clinical training places. Across O’Connor—in Albany, Denmark, Katanning, Narembeen—there are going to be nearly 700 additional clinical training days for doctors, nurses and allied health professionals working in rural and regional communities in the electorate. Of course, there are many, many other things that need to be done. We do not pretend that this is a problem that is already fully solved. We inherited a very severe workforce shortage and we are just now seeing extra graduates being able to graduate and be attracted to rural and regional Australia.

The member mentioned in his first speech the Leader of the Western Australian Nationals, who are in partnership with the Liberal government in Western Australia. There is more than $350 million on the table that this government wishes to spend in Western Australia to help reform the health system. We do not, to date, have an agreement with that Liberal government. We hope we will have one. For someone passionately interested in health coming from Western Australia, that might be a conversation that would be fruitful to have over the coming period as well.