Claire Chandler (Tasmania, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Foreign Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

I'm pleased to speak on this matter of public importance on the topic of health, which is consistently the top priority for Australians, including Tasmanians, when it comes to the delivery of government services. In a rural and regional areas around Australia, particularly in my state of Tasmania, one of the constant challenges for small communities is their ability to attract and retain general practitioners. We see this problem regularly affecting communities, particularly in the electorate of Lyons—communities like Ouse, which has been desperately trying to find GP providers to deliver primary care to that community. Indeed, we see the same problem occur regularly around Lyons when a GP in a local practice retires or moves on. When you speak residents, medical practices and councils in any part of Lyons, whether it's Deloraine, New Norfolk, Brighton, Oatlands or the Tasman Peninsula, this is raised as a concern more often than any other topic. Communities right across Tasmania have experienced the difficulty in finding GPs to live and work in their communities. Of course, in regional areas there is often an older and less mobile population who can't simply get in a car and drive to Hobart or drive to Launceston every time they need to see a doctor. They want to be able to have that service closer to home.

This is a longstanding challenge, and there are no simple solutions. We all understand that in this place. But, in the context of that challenge for regional Tasmania, it was disappointing that the government's main election tactic in Lyons was to spread misinformation about pensioners being forced onto the cashless debit card—misinformation that they continued to spread even after independent fact checks declared it false during the election campaign. When it came to specific health policies, they flew down to Tasmania, re-announced the failed Kevin Rudd GP Super Clinics policy for major cities only, jumped on a plane and left again.

The Australian Medical Association had a particularly interesting reaction to this GP Super Clinics policy at the time, and I do want to quote the AMA president:

These centres will do little to relieve the hospital logjam, will further fragment care and will unfairly compete with nearby general practices which, without this government funding, will not be able to keep their doors open after hours.

The president went further:

… the plan acknowledges the costs faced by general practices in opening after hours but instead of enabling thousands of practices across the country to improve their offering to patients, it focusses on only 50 practices, using a model reminiscent of the failed Rudd era GP Super Clinics.

This government policy will unfairly compete with the very general practices that are already having difficulties recruiting and retaining doctors in our region or rural areas. Instead of recognising the great need in those areas of Tasmania—those areas in our regions—the super clinics are to be located only in Hobart, Launceston and Burnie.

The recent decision of the Albanese government to include urban areas in the distribution priority model further exacerbates the difficulty in attracting doctors to rural parts of Tasmania. We now have a situation where incentives designed to attract GPs to move to rural and regional areas can now be used for GPs in urban areas like Sydney. Medical practices and organisations in Tasmania have made it clear that, if GPs have a choice between living in a state capital or moving to regional Tasmania, where they are desperately needed by those communities, the likely outcome is doctors will choose the capital city and it will be regional residents that miss out. If GPs who previously had an incentive to work in rural and regional parts of Australia can now get the same incentive for working in an urban area like Sydney or Brisbane then that doesn't help. It doesn't fix the rural workforce issues; it just makes them worse. There is clearly no plan from the Labor government for rural and regional health workforces.

During the campaign, they made plenty of noise about the party being more focused on health, but, just like the commitments that they'd reduce the cost of living and power prices for Australians as soon as they got into government, we're all starting to find out that those promises were completely hollow and meaningless.