Linda White (Victoria, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to respond to the question from Senator Ruston. Let's talk about GPs and let's talk about what our health system is like after we have inherited nine long years of cuts and neglect of Medicare. It's never been harder or more expensive to see a doctor than it is now. The former government froze the Medicare rebate for six years, ripping billions of dollars out of primary care and causing gap fees to skyrocket. Last week I saw a delegation of GPs about this and they talked about the hardship of running practices in a range of areas, not just in rural and regional areas but in metropolitan and outer metropolitan areas. That is a direct result of the freezing of the Medicare rebate, which has been frozen for six years. Those are the real problems that are facing our GPs, so is no wonder young doctors are walking away from general practice in droves.

Just as every new Labor government always has to do, we are cleaning up the mess that has been left behind by the Liberal Party, not just in all the other areas we have discussed but also in this massive area of health and what our GPs need and want, and what the public deserves. In 2019 the Morrison government arbitrarily axed the ability of a long list of communities to recruit overseas-trained doctors to fill gaps in general practice in those outer suburbs and the regions. That was a travesty that has caused part of the shortage that we are seeing today. Labor initiated a Senate inquiry into the GP shortages in the last parliament, as the minister discussed. It heard mountains of evidence of people not being able to see a GP at all, having to wait months for an appointment and having to travel hours when they do finally get one. I, myself, have seen many, many workers who have not been able to get medical certificates from doctors because they just could not get an appointment—that is not in rural and regional areas but in suburban Melbourne. They could not see a doctor. Then their pay got docked because they could not get a medical certificate when they were genuinely sick.

We have deliberately not changed the regional incentive payments that doctors receive for working in remote Australia, exactly because we recognise the importance of providing additional incentives for doctors to work in those remote and regional communities. The government funds a range of programs and incentives in addition to the DPA incentive to encourage GPs to relocate and work there. The Albanese government is committed to investing in general practice and strengthening Medicare with almost $1 billion of investment. Our Strengthening Medicare Taskforce will identify the best ways to boost affordability, improve access and deliver better support for patients with ongoing and chronic illnesses, backed by the $750 million Strengthening Medicare Fund. That's real progress. Those are real policies. That is in total contrast to what the Liberal-National government had done for the long nine years beforehand. The lack of policies is why we are in crisis—in fact, some policies were anti-GP—and that's what we're trying to repair.

After working tirelessly through the pandemic, our doctors will be given the resources to invest in their GP practices with our $220 million strengthening Medicare GP grants. That is real policy, that is real progress, and that will make a massive difference for GPs in rural, regional and suburban areas. We're also investing $146 million to attract and retain more health workers to rural and regional Australia. This will mean more trials of new, innovative models of primary care. During the pandemic we saw a range of innovations which we think can be continued beyond the pandemic. There are also going to be more than 1,000 places under the John Flynn Prevocational Doctor Program to encourage more hospital based junior doctors to enter general practice in rural Australia. That's how we're going to get doctors into rural Australia—by placing incentives on the table and encouraging young doctors to go to those locations.

There will also be additional training for rural generalist registrars, GP registrars and fellow GPs to undertake advanced skills training. That is real policy, that is what the Albanese comment is doing, and that will make a massive difference not just to rural and regional areas but to suburban Australia as well.