Page 2807 - Week 10 - Tuesday, 14 August 1990
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The people of Canberra require a very close investigation of this issue and a very close costing of it. They will also require that this Government focus on the delivery of high quality health services in a very strong public hospital system throughout the ACT, and that the Government back away from its announced decision to reduce the value of the public hospital system in the ACT. I think the Government should rethink its position in relation to its attack on the education system as well.
DR KINLOCH (8.54): I am very delighted to have a chance to discuss this important matter. I hope over the long pull that members on both sides of the house will be greatly in support of medical research in this city and of this city as a centre for national and international medical research.
However, 10 or maybe 15 years ago there was a possibility of a medical school here related to the ANU. I remember the considerable arguments about it at that time, often on costs. This is a matter that comes up all the time. It was the University of Newcastle which won that particular hospital. That initiative has produced since then one of the most interesting medical schools in Australia. Many young people who cannot get into medical schools on some kind of very exaggerated high level mark are able to get into that medical school because, above all, it is looking for people who will care for patients. So each medical school has its own special priorities and needs, and I would hope that will be especially true for the ACT.
Above all for the ACT there should be a focus on national and international research. There was talk at one stage in this house of a multifunction polis, you remember, and one part of that was to stress research. There is no doubt in my mind that this is what we should do. Fortunately, there is now a strong move in the ANU and also at the University of Canberra to move towards as great a degree of medical research as possible.
Happily, we already have the John Curtin medical school as a magnificent base for what may happen to move towards a medical school and teaching hospitals. Specifically - and Mr Berry has already referred to the Fraenkel report - there will be an aim to produce the fourth, fifth and sixth years of a medical school. This then will be a very special medical school where indeed the emphasis will be on young doctors who will move on into areas of research, not just for the ACT but for Australia as a whole - and, I hope, the world as a whole. But that will have very particular effects. Wherever you find very high levels of research other things flow from that, and I will come back to that in a minute.
The question arises of the location of such research and of such a medical school. Well, of course, there are many models of the way research works. Such research can be
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