Matthew Canavan (Queensland, Liberal National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate take note of answers given by the Minister for Finance (Senator Gallagher) to questions without notice from Senators McDonald and Ruston.

We have another Labor government and we have another Labor tax. It's another Labor tax that's been flagged over these past few weeks to our mining industry—our mining sector. Senator McDonald asked about that. We heard the normal weasel words we heard way back before 2010, that there are no plans today for a tax on the mining industry. But that doesn't mean, of course, there won't be a plan tomorrow.

There has been a campaign over the past few weeks to leak out to prepare the ground for attacks on Australia's mining industry and attacks on Australians' jobs. There has been complete disarray from this government about what they are going to do and how they are going to handle the skyrocketing energy prices that Australians are facing this Christmas. My wife just told me about our latest electricity bill, which has gone up by 15 per cent. I know a lot of other Australians will be facing that in the months ahead, and that's challenging for all Australians.

This government promised Australians only six months ago, at the election, that they would lower their power bills by $275 a year. They didn't just do it once or twice or three times. It wasn't a footnote in their policy. It was said 97 times by now Prime Minister Anthony Albanese that they would lower power bills by $275. They haven't done that. As we saw in their first budget, power prices are actually due to go up by 56 per cent over the next two years, completely breaking their promise.

Now they're in a desperate huddle to try and find some other solution to distract people's attention. They don't know what to do in that huddle. They're all doing different things and breaking out in different ways. We have the Minister for Industry and Science, Mr Husic, out there saying that gas companies are greedy and need to be somehow penalised—I think. It's unclear exactly what Mr Husic wants to do to them. We have Ms King, the Minister for Resources, saying, 'Oh, no, it is all fixed.' She has fixed it. She has signed a MOU with the gas industry and it will all be fine next year. And we have had the Treasury officials come to Senate estimates and say that we do need to intervene in gas markets and they themselves gave credence to this idea of a tax.

The problem we have here is, even if the Labor government get scared off introducing a tax, this is destroying confidence in our economy, it is destroying investment in the economy and that is not what we need right now in a time of high inflation. We need to attract investment to get our economy going, because we produce more. If we are more productive then that will help bring inflation down. It will create more goods for all that too much money that is out there. We saw last week the Reserve Bank governor Philip Lowe give a speech about this, and he highlighted that investment in our resources sector is at a very low level right now. It is running at three per cent of GDP. Resources accounts for seven per cent of the GDP, the actual output, so investment in resources is much lower than its share of the economy, which is quite strange right now, very strange, given that the actual price for our resources is at a record high.

Most people probably remember the previous mining boom that peaked in about 2011-12 when iron ore, coal, gas, copper and gold—almost all commodities—were at record highs. We had a massive amount of money coming through the Treasury here in Canberra. We had record investments in resources at that time. Investment in resources grew to nine per cent of GDP, with $200 billion in our gas industry and the massive expansion of iron ore and coal industries across Australia creating thousands of jobs. We had problems in regional Queensland because there was too much going on. You could not get a house and rents were through the roof but they were probably good problems to have, really, in hindsight.

Now we don't have that problem; we have the opposite problem. We are not attracting investment and that is because this government is not giving the people the confidence to invest despite these very high prices. We have coal prices sitting at $350 a tonne. The previous record was about $180 a tonne, so the prices are sitting at a level double the previous record right now. Why aren't people investing in the industry? Because there is no confidence here. They don't know what the government policy is. The government don't know what their policy is. They are arguing with each other. They are talking about taxes and regulations and all these types of penalties that may be imposed on someone. You are not going to invest and you are not going to create jobs if you have no confidence in what the policy settings will be in the years ahead when you have to pay that investment back. So I implore the government to get their act together before Christmas. Before Christmas, give a present to the thousands of Australians who rely on the resources industry for their jobs, for their livelihoods, and let us know what you are doing so we can take advantage of this record opportunity to invest.

Linda White (Victoria, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to 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.

Linda Reynolds (WA, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I too rise to take note of the question from Senator Ruston of Minister Gallagher. I hardly know where to start with this appalling Labor policy. As other colleagues have said, it is absolutely detrimental to the health care of Australia's most vulnerable in rural, regional and remote areas. It is even worse when you consider that the government admitted during estimates that they had done not a second of consultation with people who might be concerned. They've called a taskforce instead of actually going out and talking to the people of Western Australia, instead of going out into regional and remote communities to talk to them, these communities who are so starved of GP care.

For the DPA classification to now include outer metro areas is such a retrograde step for so many people in Western Australia. Let me tell you what Labor has done to Western Australia on health. We've got a health system in absolute crisis and chaos, we've got record ramping, we've got record code blacks, we've got our nurses in uproar and on strike and now, not only are we 350 young doctors short in our hospitals in Western Australia, we are over 100 GPs short, mostly in rural and remote communities. What does that mean? It means that Western Australians who are our most vulnerable, those in Indigenous communities and in other remote areas, who need health care the most cannot get the health care they need, and this will make it worse.

The minister, Minister Butler, couldn't even say today how many communities were impacted. Well, let me tell you: if we're 100 GPs short in Western Australia, the vast majority of them are in regional and remote areas. According to Western Australian doctors, that means that in every town that is without a GP or is underserviced by GPs there are 50 people a day who are not getting the support and the medical support they need—50 people a day per doctor for our most vulnerable. So, shame on Labor—again, policy on the run, without even consulting anyone.

Let me finish by providing some of the information that if Labor had come to Western Australia and gone out into regional Australia they would have found out. As I said, regional health is struggling by 100 doctors that we're missing and we cannot get, for about 50 patients a day. So, even areas that are closer to the city—take, for example, Toodyay—are concerned because they're competing with Margaret River, competing with the coast and now competing with outer suburbs of Perth. Shame on Labor.

Question agreed to.