Mark Furner (Queensland, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to take note of the questions about the GP superclinics. Before our election we went to the electorate to establish 31 GP superclinics and that was with $275 million on the table. That number has recently been increased to 36 clinics. In September this year the official opening occurred for the first fully operational superclinic at Ballan. The clinic there is providing increased GP and dental services for the first time to the local community. A further five sites—Southern Lake Macquarie, Palmerston, Devonport, Blue Mountains and Warrnambool—have new and ready services that have been available and provided to the community. In one example in Palmerston, almost 9,000 patients have visited the clinic since it opened last December, with 92 per cent of those patients being treated at the clinic and helping to take pressure off the Royal Darwin Hospital.

In the electorate of Dickson, of which I am a duty senator, I have had firsthand exposure to seeing the construction of that particular clinic. In fact, I have met with the person that won the contract, Dr Evans, and he is working tirelessly with the local community, including the Indigenous population, to make sure they are understood and provided for when that clinic opens. The clinic is well in advance of the schedule. This folly about us not delivering on health, particularly GP superclinics, is just farcical.

The official launch of that particular clinic was reasonably well attended by the local Moreton Bay regional councillors, the Mayor of Moreton Bay region and me, but there was one person that was silent and could not even bother to turn up on the day. Who was that? It was none other than the member for Dickson, the shadow health minister, Peter Dutton. Where was he? Was he down at McPherson? Was he down at one of those electorates at the Gold Coast trying to win a preselection down there? Most likely he could have been down there but for some reason he did not have the decency to bother turning up for that official first stage of the Strathpine GP superclinic. However, he has recently come out on Lateline on 28 July and said:

… I think there is overwhelming support in the Australian public for significant change to take place so that we cannot repeat the same mistakes over the next decade that we’ve repeated over the last decade.

How is that from a shadow health minister, admitting that there were mistakes 10 years ago when they were in government, and coming out and saying on Lateline that they cannot afford to make the same mistakes over again.

These superclinics work through set criteria, which includes identifying high levels of need in addressing chronic disease, poor access to services, particularly GP shortages and Medicare services, poor health infrastructure and taking pressure off the local public hospital. These clinics are all about addressing health concerns in our regions and ensuring that we do not end up with the problems that we had in the past.

If you look in the past we had a government that neglected to train enough nurses and doctors. They allowed Australian nursing shortages to reach 6,000 nurses; 60 per cent of the country is affected by health workforce shortages. They cut funding for public hospitals by $1 billion and left 650,000 people languishing on public dental waiting lists, with many waiting years for care. They neglected aged care and some of the most vulnerable people in our communities. At times when they needed care the most, they were left in hospital beds every night because of the shortage of aged-care places. And what did we get? We only got the same rhetoric of the blame game for 12 years, and they played that blame game with the state governments and never came up with a long-term plan to improve our hospitals. Here are some key facts and figures on our proposals. (Time expired)