Michael McCormack (Riverina, National Party, Shadow Minister for International Development and the Pacific) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Yesterday I had the pleasure of meeting with immediate past president of the Rural Doctors Association of Australia, Dr Megan Belot, who is a Charleville based rural generalist in outback Queensland. Indeed, today I had a meeting with the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners Rural Council chair, Associate Professor Michael Clements. They both expressed to me great disappointment—huge disappointment—that the Labor government had changed the distribution priority areas for doctors. They changed it such that, when Labor took government in May 2022, what happens now is that Labor consider Newcastle and Wollongong and coastal and peri-urban areas of capital cities to be priority areas, whereas we know that those doctors should be staying in regional and remote areas. What happened when they made the change is that doctors in those areas, in those remote and regional areas, took their shingles off their surgeries and moved to the coast.

This is outrageous, because when you are in pain you shouldn't have to catch a plane; you should be able to have a doctor's appointment in your own country town. Yet, unfortunately, Labor has just ignored that. Many women—and I appreciate that Labor has been spruiking its new women's health plan this week—are missing out. Why is Labor shunning country areas and medicine like this?