Louise Pratt (WA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

When I read the MPI this morning and its topic, I was completely astonished. For a representative of a party that, while in power, dismantled and starved our rural and regional health workforce of funding and employment opportunities to bring on an MPI on this topic, to my mind, was extraordinary. I will go into the detail and unpack that—perhaps they were taking more credit in looking at their own policies in a blinkered way without seeing what was going on?

We saw years of neglect of our Medicare system by the coalition. In my own home state, if you look at rural and regional Western Australia, the spending on Medicare per head of population is proportionately so much lower than anyone in a metropolitan area. People do not have access in rural and regional Western Australia to the health professionals, such as doctors and specialists, that they should be able to go and see. The lack of access to health professions is very much reflected in the per head spending on Medicare around regional WA when compared to the Perth metropolitan area. So I wonder, really, what's going on in the heads of those opposite. While, in your time in government, you ripped billions of dollars out of primary care and caused gap fees to rocket, so we will clean up that mess left by the Liberal Party—but this is not going to be easy.

The last government arbitrarily axed the ability of a long list of communities to recruit overseas trained doctors to fill gaps in general practice as well as those in outer suburbs and the regions. There's a dire need not only in regional WA but also in Perth communities. In Western Australia last year a well-known paediatrician died, a paediatrician who had a high case load. As a result of that, the waiting list to get in to see a paediatrician blew out for everyone by more than a year. It wouldn't matter if you were a high-needs family or child or not; you could not get in to see a paediatrician for more than a year. This is the legacy of the historical underfunding of our medical—