Michaelia Cash (WA, Liberal Party, Minister for Employment, Skills, Small and Family Business) Share this | Hansard source

The government understands that rolling out health policies that are uniform across regional Australia hasn't always worked. When you have a country the size of Australia, one-size-fits-all is not always the way to go, so we, as a government, are looking at drilling down into more innovative and collaborative ways of supporting our regional health workforce. As Senator Davey would know, evidence shows that when students undertake their training in the regions they are more likely to stay in the regions. That's why the funding that we've provided in the 2020-21 budget includes an additional $50.3 million to enhance the rural training pipeline through the longstanding Rural Health Multidisciplinary Training Program. We understand that providing the funding to ensure that we can extend training into smaller rural communities and rural residential aged-care facilities will assist those in rural and regional Australia. (Time expired)