Rebekha Sharkie (Mayo, Centre Alliance) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question's to the Minister for Education. Between June 2022 and June 2024 the Australian population increased by 1.19 million, 4.4 per cent. Over that time, Commonwealth supported places for medicine have effectively stayed the same. With one in three GPs set to retire, the AMA has forecast a shortfall of 10,000 GPs in Australia. Will you urgently lift the number of Commonwealth supported places to study medicine to help address the doctor shortage in Australia?

Jason Clare (Blaxland, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Education) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the member for her question. As she would know, in the budget two years ago, we allocated extra places for medical studies at university. That's something we did in consultation with the Minister for Health and Aged Care. That's something that's always under consideration by this government. As I've said in this chamber many times, I want more people to get a crack at going to university or going to TAFE. That's why we're making the changes that we are, whether it's making TAFE free, which the opposition are opposed to, or whether it's cutting the cost of university by cutting student debt by 20 per cent. In December, we released the mid-year economic update, where we allocated additional funding to university to help more young people get a crack at going to university, including—and I know this is important to the member, because she's contacted me on a number of occasions about young people being able to study far away from capital cities—the announcement we made yesterday around a university study hub at Kangaroo Island. This is a classic example of extra funding to help children from poor backgrounds and from regional Australia to get the support they need not just to start a university degree but to finish it—real, demand driven, needs based funding to help more students not just start a degree but finish it so that we get the doctors that we need, the teachers that we need, the nurses that we need, the psychologists that we need, the social workers that we need and all of the skilled workforce that we need to build Australia's future.