Alicia Payne (Canberra, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

This week we learned yet another bulkbilling GP in Canberra has shut its doors, with the Hobart Place General Practice closing. For about 40 years, this clinic has provided affordable health care to generations of students and vulnerable Canberrans. The clinics says that the Medicare rebate, frozen under the coalition, played a significant role in the closure and made the practice financially unviable. This is terrible news for Canberra, which has some of the lowest bulk-billing rates in the country. It's also bad news for the residents of surrounding southern New South Wales who travel to Canberra for care. Dr Joo-Inn Chew, who has worked at Hobart Place for 20 years, put this loss into perspective in her piece in the Canberra Times today. She spoke about the difficulties of general practice but also the rewards, and that in her 20 years of practice she became a better doctor and a better human.

One of the key reasons for the low bulk-billing rate in Canberra is the Morrison government's decision in 2020 to remove ACT and Queanbeyan doctors from eligibility criteria for rural incentives. Too many Canberrans are struggling to access the primary care that they need. Fortunately, the health minister, Mark Butler, is working to fix this mess, having delivered the strengthening Medicare task force report, and he's focused on making Medicare more accessible. It may be too late to save the Hobart Place GP, but I will continue to advocate for my constituents in Canberra to access the primary care that they need.