Nigel Scullion (NT, Country Liberal Party, Deputy Leader of the Nationals) Share this | Hansard source

I indicated earlier that we will be supporting this amendment, but I will just make a couple of comments. My first point is about the motive for the government saying that it will provide a medical practitioner as part of Medicare to scrutinise these things. We all thought that was pretty good and people thought they had a high level of safety. The reason they thought they had a high level of safety was not because a medical practitioner would know a knee bone from an elbow bone; it was because we respect doctors and we respect the Hippocratic oath. If your patient records eventually went somewhere, they were effectively not leaving the medical profession. That is the reason we are supporting Senator Fielding’s amendment. This discussion has concerned me a little bit and I think I have even more support for it now. I understand that we are saying, ‘Who would want to go and photocopy it?’