Andrew Gee (Calare, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The push for the Murray Darling Medical School continues, with its aim of training doctors in the bush for practice in the bush. The big urban universities continue to oppose the Murray Darling Medical School out of a combination of what I believe to be a condescending elitism and also a desire to protect their nice little earner, which sees them training a large number of foreign students who pay for freight and then leave Australia when they graduate. Yet, on any objective view, the system they preside over has failed country Australia. Despite the rhetoric and years of trying, they continually fail to produce doctors willing to practice medicine in the country.

For years, they have said that the Murray Darling Medical School cannot happen because the training places simply do not exist. Yesterday, that myth was exploded with the arrival of a new report into those clinical training places. It unequivocally shows that there is sufficient existing and future capacity to meet the needs of the Murray Darling Medical School. This report will be a real test into the medical training review that is currently underway. If the review is fair dinkum, it will not be able to ignore these findings. And the communities of the west are watching.

The chronic shortage of doctors in country Australia needs to ends. This is a matter of equity between the city and the bush. The time for the Murray Darling Medical School has come.