Page 1640 - Week 06 - Wednesday, 18 May 1994
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Of course, in Tuggeranong in recent years there has been a quite dramatic expansion of private practitioners in general practice operating in bulkbilling clinics. There are some 32 doctors in the Tuggeranong Valley who bulkbill. There are more doctors, but there are 32 who will bulkbill everybody. Of those 32 doctors, it turns out that some 10 are women, so the balance of male to female doctors is about the average across Canberra. Not only are there 32 doctors in Tuggeranong who bulkbill, but many of them are operating out of what has been a very interesting innovation in recent years as a clear result of the Federal Labor Government's policy on Medicare and bulkbilling - the 24-hour or extended hours clinic.
Mr De Domenico: Privately run clinics.
MR CONNOLLY: Privately run by private practitioners but operating on a bulkbill basis. That is a terrific innovation. There has always been one problem with the government medical centres across Canberra. If we had the goldmine or the oilwell in the Brindabellas that Mrs Carnell seems to know about to fund all the promises of the Liberal Party, we would probably open for extended hours. But no government has been able to open government medical centres beyond 9 to 5. Unfortunately, as Mrs Carnell and Mr De Domenico well know, kids tend not to get sick between 9 and 5. They have an unfortunate tendency to get sick at 7 o'clock or 11 o'clock at night or 3 o'clock in the morning.
We have seen the emergence of the 24-hour clinics. We have them now on both the north side and the south side. Apart from 24-hour clinics, we have quite a number of clinics that may not be open at 3 o'clock in the morning but they certainly are open right through until 11 o'clock at night. These clinics, operated by the private sector, are providing an extraordinary level of service and working cooperatively with Medicare - the Labor Government's significant reform of medicine in this country - in a bulkbilling practice.
It struck me as odd that these two Liberals were raising a hue and cry that residents of Tuggeranong were being deprived of access to medical service because there are only three government doctors. I thought, "My goodness! I thought the Liberals were always extolling the virtues of the private system and saw a balance between private medicine and public medicine and would have understood that residents in Tuggeranong in fact have extensive access to GPs at no cost to themselves" - that is the important thing about Medicare - "through the extended hours clinics".
If we were to suddenly decide, as an enhancement proposal in this year's budget, to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars employing more government doctors at the Tuggeranong Health Centre and extending the opening hours of the Tuggeranong Health Centre to 11 o'clock at night, the Liberal Party, and no doubt the AMA and the College of General Practitioners, would say, "Hang on a minute. You are using taxpayers' funds to undermine a private business". I can see the press release now. How we would be expected to respond to that press release I really do not know. If we acted on their call to provide more public doctors, we would be undermining the private sector. It seemed to me odd that the Liberal Party, the great defenders of private medicine and the people who extol the virtues of private medicine, seem to ignore the fact that the private sector has provided a very good service in the Tuggeranong Valley.
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