Andrew Broad (Mallee, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The people I serve are the people who live in Mallee. I always say they should be able to drive on a decent road, make a mobile phone call, have good educational opportunities for their children and know that, if they go to the doctor, there will be one there. I care about their health, and I will be looking forward to working with the minister for regional development to redirect the little bit of money that we have left over from the building of the Mildura runway upgrade. We've upgraded the runway, which has been essential, but what we want is an air ambulance transfer station.

Currently, with a population of 65,000 people, we have three air ambulances a day transporting people generally to Melbourne to hospitals. In the last few weeks it's averaged over 44 degrees each day, being very hot. If you have a subdural haemorrhage, the transfer time to move you from an ambulance to an air ambulance can be upward of an hour. That is upward of an hour on a tarmac of 44 degrees. So I look forward to an air ambulance transfer station coming to my patch. Essentially, an ambulance can pull into a shed where it's air-conditioned and do the transfer and then the patient can be loaded onto the plane and taken to hospital in Melbourne.

I care about the health of the people I represent. I don't think it's too much to ask that people who live in regional Australia have these sorts of facilities so that, when we move them from large population bases to the health services we have in our cities, they are transferred in a way that is mindful of the climate conditions that they have to be transferred in on the tarmacs of our airports.