Paul Scarr (Queensland, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Perhaps I can strike a somewhat more conciliatory note as we discuss what I consider to be a very important issue, and that is the access of Australians to general practitioners across this country.

For those in the gallery—through you, Mr Deputy President—I might just explain what we're talking about here. It is what's referred to as distribution priority areas. For those areas which are classified as distribution priority areas, there are various incentives in place to attract medical professionals into those areas to be general practitioners. Benefits to attract medical professionals into those areas include, for international medical graduates and foreign graduates of accredited medical schools, having access to Medicare in those distribution priority areas only. If overseas medical practitioners come to this country, they can access Medicare as long as they're practising in those areas.

The whole intention of this policy is to try to provide an incentive for that pool of professionals to provide general practice services to Australians living in those rural and regional areas. That's the issue we're talking about. In my view, the system is broken and we shouldn't be focusing so much on history; we should be focusing on the way forward. How do we fix the system? We know the system is broken. There is such a lack of general practitioners that we now have the absurd situation of the incentives which are meant to be given to a medical practitioner to go to a place like Emerald, in my home state of Queensland, which is three hours from Rockhampton, being the same as the incentives which are provided to medical practitioners to practice at Fyshwick, 13 or 15 minutes down the road from Parliament House. It doesn't make sense.