Pat Conaghan (Cowper, National Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Social Services) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I've spoken often in this place about regional health and the resources that we need to keep our population safe and healthy. We're in desperate need of pathways to attract more GPs, which the recent changes to the distribution priority areas have already eroded. We need better access to specialist services and more facilities and better equipment in our hospitals. But, in my recent discussions with the community, the regular closures of ambulance stations in our smaller towns in Cowper have been a grave concern. So I ask: why is the New South Wales Labor government playing with the lives of regional people through inadequate staffing and sporadic operational hours of our ambulance services? Do they not care about the health and safety of our hardworking and burnt-out paramedics?

NSW obviously stands for 'Newcastle, Sydney and Wollongong' because it's genuinely hard to see where the focus is on the regions outside the cities. Fire crews are increasingly being called on to assist overstretched paramedics in regional areas, despite the Minns government promising to boost the number of rural paramedics. I've heard from paramedics who describe the new staffing zones as problematic and dangerous. Where previously there were smaller clusters of service areas, there are now large expanses of zones—like the Mid North Coast zone that covers my electorate—that allocate staff ineffectively for the needs of the region. An area like Macksville and Nambucca Heads, for instance, can be left without services for anywhere from three hours to a full 24 hours. Even Kempsey, one of our larger towns, has been left without services for over seven hours twice in the last month. What happens if a mother goes into a difficult labour, if a child suffers anaphylactic shock or if there is a stroke victim? Minutes count. These communities aren't remote. They're growing regions on the eastern border of New South Wales.

I'll admit that I don't often side with large unions, but I have spoken with paramedics who are members of the HSU. They have described the efforts of their union with the new government as proactive and insistent but, ultimately, futile. This is a government that promised the world but delivered an atlas for the hardworking men and women of NSW Ambulance. I call on the Minns government to respect regional workers and paramedics to whom they made promises prior to the election and whose conditions in the regions have in fact worsened over the past six months since the Minns government came to power. I call on the Minns government to do their job.