Yvette D'Ath (Petrie, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to talk about the importance of health reform to members in this place and the other place. We know that prior to this parliament being dissolved in July of this year that the Rudd government had already many health initiatives underway. The government had already commenced GP training places and had provided funding for over 1,000 new university places for nurses every year. We were already upgrading the emergency departments of 37 hospitals around the country and delivering new elective surgery equipment and operating theatres for 125 hospitals. We had already delivered more than 62,000 extra elective surgery procedures. We had commenced rolling out our GP superclinics across this country—36 new superclinics. We were providing incentives for doctors to work in rural and remote communities and we had increased aged care places by nearly 10,000. We introduced a health check-up for every four year old and the Medicare Teen Dental Plan.

Since the election in August this year, the Gillard government has not stood still. We have continued to move forward on health reform in this country, with such initiatives as further funding for clinical training days for local medical nursing and allied health professionals. This initiative provides more support for our local health and medical professionals in our own communities; it will provide funding for up to 27,099 more clinical training days in the electorate of Petrie. In total, this amounts to 1.2 million additional training days annually—an increase of 23.4 per cent compared to the 2009 baseline. There are 448 projects across 41 universities and over 700 clinical training providers. The training will occur across a variety of locations and professional settings—for instance, 60 per cent of the providers will be from the non-government private sector and 41 per cent will be placement days in a priority setting such as aged care, dental care, mental care, primary health care and community based services, and 37 per cent of the additional days will be in rural and remote areas.

We have announced an $800 million boost for remote and regional health services. This has resulted in 42 organisations around Australia receiving funding of more than $8.3 million for health infrastructure projects under the fourth round of the government’s National Rural and Remote Health Infrastructure Program. In addition, we have opened consultation on the Alcohol-Free Community Sponsorship Fund to see what we can do about dealing with the national binge drinking problem that we have in this country. This is in line with a commitment of $103.5 million for the National Binge Drinking strategy. Today, the Minister for Health and Ageing has announced the commencement of the process for delivering another 28 new GP superclinics to local communities around Australia, with an extra $233 million investment in primary health care. I particularly praise this announcement because my community—as one of the areas in which a superclinic is being built; it is due to be completed by June 2011—knows the benefits that will come from it, with primary health care and specialist services but, most importantly, training of GPs and medical professionals in the area. That is not currently occurring. Of course, we have other important initiatives in e-health where we have specialists coming from around the country to a conference in November to talk about the importance of introducing e-health across our health system.

Just this week, we saw two important bills introduced into this House—landmark reforms for the funding of the health system under the health reform agenda. We saw, unfortunately, the Australian National Preventive Health Agency Bill 2010. I spoke on this bill back in October 2009. I was proud to get up in this House and speak in support of this bill. I was very disappointed to see this bill back before this House and being debated again this week. I say to the members on the other side and to the senators who are still to consider these important pieces of legislation, these important reforms in health, that they need to support them.

Harry Jenkins (Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Order! It being 5.00 pm, the debate is interrupted.