Gerard Rennick (Queensland, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I've actually got something important to say because I actually know the history of health care in this country. Let me tell you, the state governments have taken advantage of the good nature that Medicare was set up for and have cost shifted from the states onto the federal government. I know that because when I grew up and had to see a doctor I would sit in a thing called 'Outpatients' in a public hospital. That has been renamed Emergency. The reason they renamed it Emergency is so that people don't go to Emergency. The state governments want it that way because then they don't have to pick up the cost. By sending it to a doctor in the primary healthcare system they get the federal government to pick up the cost. The problem with that is that it has overloaded the system on the doctors. What we need in this country is more doctors on fixed salaries, and we need the public health system in the states—to be honest, we need to go further than this. We need to get one level of government trying to run health care in this country, because we're getting this cost shifting all the time in this blame game between the federal and state governments, and these ambiguous responsibilities result in nothing but name-calling, rather than problem-solving.

I will touch on something that Senator Green was talking about, this so-called discount for the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme. That may sound very well at first intentions, but the point is that you need to ask the question. I notice there was a cholesteryl drug called Lipitor, which was a prescription drug patented by Pfizer. This goes back a decade or so. The Australian government was paying about 50 bucks for this particular drug, and Pfizer was collecting about $40 of the $50. The fact was that there was a similar generic drug that came off patent that you could have bought for $2. So it's all very well saying that you're spending billions of dollars on the PBS, but the question needs to be asked whether or not there are suitable drugs out there that you can use and that aren't going to line the pockets of rich pharmaceutical companies. I would like to see greater detail of the PBS.

Getting back onto doctors and having priority schemes for doctors, the fact of the matter is that we've got an undersupply of doctors in this country. We need to also point the finger at the professional bodies of the medical industry who, quite frankly, aren't training enough doctors here in this country. I touched on this in my maiden speech. It is an absolute insult that Australia, a first-world country, is importing doctors from underdeveloped countries because our AMA and our doctors are running a cartel in this country and are restricting the supply of specialist services in order to make sure that they can maximise their fees. We've got to have a serious look at this.

I don't want to get bipartisan on this, because I am sick to death of the health issues that we've got in this country. If we're meant to solve this problem, we really need to get one level of government taking responsibility for health. I'm happy to work with Labor on this, and I mean that, because regional health is very, very important to me. In the last 30 years, I've seen under the Queensland state Labor government the closure of over 30 maternity wards in regional Queensland. I know that it happens in other states, as well.

That's because of a combination of factors, but one of those factors is that we just will not get doctors to go to the regions. They don't want to take on the insurance because they work in the private sector. We've got a problem with training nurses. Many nurses now do either general practice or midwifery but they don't do both. If you want nurses out in the regions you need them to get their general ticket—mum would always call it a 'general ticket'—and be a midwife as well. Out there, there aren't enough babies being born every day to have a full-time midwife; they need to also be general nurses as well.

At the end of the day, what we really need are better front-end services. I would actually like to get rid of the states altogether, but it is absurd that we have nine health bureaucracies in this country while our front-end services are suffering. We've really got to get serious about having a big overview. If you want a job summit, you should have a health summit—and I will turn up to that one, I guarantee you that.