Page 3308 - Week 09 - Wednesday, 20 August 2008
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(2) calls on the Leader of the Opposition to table, by 5 p.m. today, his revised costings for his proposal to establish three after-hours clinics, following his admission that they would now be established without Commonwealth funding.”.
The issue of general practice and the shortage of general practitioners in the community is a serious one that both the ACT government and the commonwealth government need to continue to focus on, but the speech that we have just heard from the leader of the B team, Mrs Burke, is one of the more alarming speeches because it highlights the ignorance of those opposite about how the Australian healthcare system works.
It failed to acknowledge the responsibilities which begin to be set out in the constitution and then flow from there. It failed to acknowledge the reality of the healthcare system and how it operates here in the ACT and it sought to address very complex problems by providing cash incentives and, in a more misleading way, by trying to convince the community that a Liberal government would establish three bulk-billing clinics across the ACT and run those with a budget that they have allocated. It is simply not able to be delivered on.
In fact, the Leader of the Opposition yesterday confirmed that they would be running those clinics without commonwealth funding and that they would be fully self-funded, which indicates that they will not be bulk-billing centres; they will be centres that are fully run with the recurrent expenditure of the ACT budget. If that is the case, and that was confirmed on television last night, the budget that has been allocated has just been blown out of the water.
The amendment I have moved goes to the issues of how hard the primary healthcare sector works, particularly our community GPs. It highlights the responsibility of the commonwealth to ensure that adequate primary healthcare services are provided in the community. It notes the efforts of the ACT government to support our local GP workforce. It also notes the ACT government’s 10-year plan to overhaul the public health system, which is our area of responsibility. It notes the complexity of the health system and the very real need to provide responsible, realistic and achievable solutions. It also calls on the Leader of the Opposition to table his revised costings for his proposal to establish three after-hours clinics, that are no longer bulk-billing clinics, as we found out last night, following his admission that they would now be established without commonwealth funding.
I have had to move this amendment because the problem with the motion moved by Mrs Burke is that it fails to understand the healthcare system in Australia. That is the first point. It fails to understand the lines of responsibility—that is, the commonwealth has responsibility for regulating, training and funding the GP health system. It fails to understand the complexity of issues that are dealt with in the health system.
I refer, for example, to the students. The ACT government has been working for many years under the IMET system of allocation of interns. That is because we have not had our own students to allocate and we have relied on the goodwill of New South Wales to lend us their students and allocate them to the ACT’s public hospital system
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