Pauline Hanson (Queensland, Pauline Hanson's One Nation Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I just want to raise that we have a huge problem with our medical institutions in this country. We cannot provide the services that Australians truly need through lack of funding, poor policy decisions and governments that are completely overrun with putting in place too many bureaucrats and administrators. The money is not getting to where it's needed in hospitals and services. What needs to be done?

We don't have enough GPs coming through the system. We're quite open to bringing in doctors from overseas that have trouble even speaking English. Why don't we look at getting more GPs through the system? As we have said, for someone to go through the system and become a GP, they have to get 99.5 per cent on the test. Well, why don't we drop it to 95 per cent? Let them go through. They'll be sorted out, the wheat from the chaff, if they're not up to doing the service. We need more Australians going through and doing the service of becoming doctors.

Private practices come to see me and talk about their concerns. Their funding has not increased over the last 10 years, and it has not been indexed, so therefore they're going backwards in their funding. GPs are not staying in the services. They want to get out. This is another big problem. You need to look at the funding going to these private practices as well, because, for 95 per cent of the consultations they do, they only receive seven per cent of the funding. That can be addressed.

You've also got doctors that were signed up on contracts to do three years service for their fees to be paid for, and they're given 18 years to do it. Only a few hundred have actually done it. You've got thousands that haven't made the commitment. Why don't we reduce it so that they need to actually do this in seven years?

We have to put the money into the hospital boards, not the administrators, and let the hospital boards fund themselves and run themselves—not state governments that are overburdened with administrators and the waste of money that's happening.