ADDRESS TO PARLIAMENT - PRIVATE MEMBERS' BUSINESS - Medicare

The distribution priority areas might be okay in the member for Lalor's electorate. Her electorate is just 17 kilometres north of Melbourne's central business district. But it's not there that the doctors are most needed. It's out in regional and particularly remote Australia where they are now suffering because of the distribution changes brought about by this Albanese Labor government. The Rural Doctors Association said that the ink wasn't dry on the changes to the policy before doctors were already leaving the bush. Doctors were already leaving those areas in the country which were already doing it tough.

I'm proud of the fact that I put in place as Deputy Prime Minister the Murray-Darling Medical Schools Network. That goes through Wagga Wagga, Orange, Mildura, Dubbo and so many places that were crying out for doctors—not necessarily those regional hubs but many of the little towns around them, many of the little bush hospitals that relied so heavily on those major country centres. But for that rural medical school network, I don't know where they'd be. I don't know where some of those centres would get their doctors.

I heard the member for Lalor talking about the pharmaceutical dispensing changes. My goodness! Country pharmacists—there are more than 300—are the only health professionals in some of those 300 communities, because they don't have a doctor and they don't have a hospital. They just have a chemist—a chemist that was going to be forced to potentially shut because of that change, because of that new 60-day rule that Labor put into place. Then we look at health and talk about bulk billing. Bulk-billing rates have fallen dramatically by 11 per cent under Labor's watch. If Labor members can get up and claim that we are better served, healthwise, under them than under the previous coalition government, I tell you that they are absolutely kidding themselves, and they are indeed misleading the House.

I am very pleased to talk about the record of the former coalition government in health. There were more than 94 million telehealth consultations through Medicare with 16 million patients. Telehealth is not the answer; we need professionals, face-to-face. But, in rural centres, where sometimes you can't get that face-to-face contact, then telehealth is doing the job. There were 857 new medicines listed on the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme since 2019 in that last term of government alone and more than 128,000 Australians supported by headspace each year. Everybody across the parliament would agree that headspace is doing a great job with mental health with our young people. There were 1,400 additional nurse placements for the regions.

The distribution priority areas changes have enabled places such as outer suburban areas of metropolitan cities, the Gold Coast, Newcastle and Wollongong to say that they are short of doctors at the expense of regional centres that in some places don't have a doctor for hundreds and hundreds of kilometres. It shouldn't be that when in pain, catch the plane. It shouldn't be that way. Doctors should be encouraged in every way, shape or form to put their shingle up in a country centre, but Labor has taken that away. They have absolutely taken away the incentive and the encouragement by putting in place a measure by which they say that some of these peri-urban centres somehow should be in the distribution priority areas. They are not; they should not be in that list, because it's coming at the expense of hard-working Australians, who, I might add, carried this country during COVID.

When every city type wanted to pull their doona up over their head and pretend that life wasn't happening and it would all blow over, the regional people in many of these remote centres were doing the farming, growing the food, growing the fibre, doing the mining that kept this nation's lights on, kept this nation fed and kept the clothes on people's backs and not just for Australians but for many other nations besides. Then Labor members come in here with these motions, talking themselves up as though they are the ant's pants to health provisions in this country. Well, I'm calling it out. Indeed, Labor has not been good for health, and particularly for regional health, which is crying out for more doctors and nurses. What have we got? We have a government that doesn't know, doesn't understand and worst of all, doesn't care.