Jan McLucas (Queensland, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Mental Health) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate take note of questions asked by opposition senators today.

I asked Senator Nash some questions today about the impact of the interrelationship between the proposals to change the way we fund our universities in this country, and the impact that will have on the future health workforce in Australia.

Frankly, I was rather disappointed at Senator Nash's somewhat flippant responses. I would have thought, given the commentary—in the health media, and around health generally—about the concern that we have about how many doctors and nurses we are going to need in the future, that Minister Nash would have had a far more fulsome answer to the question that I raised.

The Australian Nursing and Midwife Federation yesterday called on all of us to reject the deregulation in university fees. I will quote them again. They said:

It’s nonsensical that as a significant Australian nursing shortage looms over the next decade, the Abbott Government is intent on systematically destroying nursing education in this country …

The coalition government has form on this. When they were in government last time I believe it was health minister Abbott who cut the training places for our doctors, and as a direct result of that action his government had to deal with the doctor shortages that arose. They had to make large increases to the number of undergraduate doctor places, and then we had again the problem we now have with training. You have to plan for a workforce. I was terribly disappointed that Minister Nash had not been asking her department to get busy, to do the work, and analyse the impact of fee deregulation on our health system and on our health system's ability to attract, to train and to retrain Australian nurses. I was shocked that Senator Nash said there would be no impact on the way we train nurses. We know that most of our young people going into nurse training are women, and if we say to them that they will graduate with a bill of $63,000 if they go into nurse training then surely that will raise a question in the minds of those young women. The current cost of getting a nursing degree is $23,000. Basically, we are going to triple that cost. Of course it is going to be a disincentive for young women—particularly young women from rural areas who are from low-income families—to undertake a nursing degree. How are we going to staff our hospitals into the future, how are we going to staff our aged care facilities into the future, if we put such a barrier in front of young people getting a nursing education?

Minister Nash also referred to an answer she gave yesterday to Senator Ketter. She said yesterday:

If those opposite paid a little more attention—

be assured we do pay attention—

they would realise that that is National Party policy. We then go on to form coalition policy for the election campaign and that immediately addresses the issue.

That made me go and find their health policy. It states:

Only The Nationals’ Regional Health Rescue Plan can ensure that the one third of Australians living in the regions get a fair go from the health system and a fair share of health funding.

So what do they do? They go around Australia with this document that says that only the Nationals can do this and then they go into their little meeting with the coalition and say, 'This is what we've put together'—and what happens then? The Liberal Party says, 'That's no good; we won't have that.' But they have had their campaigning opportunity, running around Australia telling everybody that only the Nationals can do this. The first thing in the Nationals' plan is that they will have a minister for regional health. But we do not have a minister for regional health. Everyone who has read this document, who voted National because they believed that this was what the National Party would deliver for them, believed that we would have a minister for regional health—but we do not. We do not have a minister for regional health and country people are the big losers in this budget. (Time expired)