Nita Green (Queensland, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

This week, I was in Townsville. I was very pleased to be there to announce that the urgent care clinic in Townsville will be opening on 18 December. A provider has been found, and I was very pleased to visit the Eastbrooke Family Clinic in Townsville and to talk to them about exactly what this urgent care clinic will mean for the people of North Queensland. We were joined there by the ambulance service, the hospital, people and GPs to talk about exactly what an urgent care clinic will do. What we heard directly from the community is that this urgent-care clinic will take the pressure off the emergency department there in Townsville, and it's really welcomed. It's something we committed to before the election—to deliver urgent-care clinics across the country—and that's exactly what we're doing. I'm really pleased to say that this is one of 11 Medicare urgent-care clinics that we are announcing in Queensland, and we are getting started before the end of the year. So far, we've had urgent-care clinics in Bundaberg, Gold Coast, Ipswich, Logan, North Brisbane, Murrumba Downs, South Brisbane and Toowoomba, and Townsville has opened just this week. We're looking forward to the clinics in Cairns and Rockhampton opening shortly too.

While we hear from so many people in regional Queensland that getting in to see a GP and making it more affordable is so important to them and their families, we have heard complete silence on all these issues, including health and housing, by the Liberal and National members who supposedly represent these electorates in regional Queensland. It has been really disappointing to see them focus on nasty politics and dividing our country instead of getting in there and advocating for better housing, for better health care, for more jobs and for more manufacturing. It's as if they've been asleep at the wheel. It's as if they've switched off. It's time for them to wake up and listen to people from regional Queensland.