Janet Rice (Victoria, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

There is no doubt the shortage of healthcare workers, including GPs, in rural and regional Australia is at absolute crisis point. We have got a massive problem, which is absolutely a sign of failure of the previous government. The previous government led us to a situation where now the crisis point is so obvious that anybody in rural and regional Australia that talks to you about access to GPs and healthcare practitioners will tell you that it is a huge problem.

The question that I find really juicy, that we need to talk about today, is what we do about it. What measures are going to be put in place by this new government to actually seriously address that problem?

I chaired the inquiry by the Senate Community Affairs References Committee into the provision of general practitioners in outer metropolitan, rural and regional Australia, and we travelled quite widely across regional Australia. I'm hoping that that inquiry will be re-referred to the community affairs committee so that we can continue our investigations.

It was eye-opening, during those hearings, to hear countless health practitioners share their concerns about the lack of access to timely and affordable health care—particularly to GPs in the bush—and to hear of the consequences for people's health. One doctor from coastal New South Wales told us: 'We're at breaking point, trying to service the needs of our community with a depleting number of very tired and very stressed doctors.' We've got doctors in rural areas working 80 or more hours a week. We've got people waiting for weeks to see their GPs. And then there's just zero accessibility to allied health practitioners. We've got a massive problem.

Our committee recommended that the government investigates substantially increasing the Medicare rebates for all levels of general practice consultations, as well as other general-practice funding options, and that we review the primary-care components of the medical education curriculum with a view to ensuring that general practice is a core component of the curriculum. These were consensus recommendations of that committee.

But, fundamentally, what we need to do is to properly fund and support health care across the board. That means actually putting the money into health care, and it means doing things like putting dental care and mental care into Medicare. It means actually spending the money and it means raising the money—it means actually saying: 'Yes, we should have a corporate superprofits tax. We should have a tax on billionaires. We should scrap the stage 3 tax cuts, which are going to cost the budget bottom line over $200 billion over the next 10 years'—and putting that money into services such as health care, education and income support, the services that the people of Australia really need. (Time expired)