This year’s Rural Medicine Australia conference opened with a big promise from Shadow Health Minister Anne Ruston.
A newly-elected Liberal federal government would put an end to the avalanche of health consultations and reviews that have defined Health Minister Mark Butler’s time in office, delegates at Rural Medicine Australia were told.
Shadow Minister for Health Senator Anne Ruston addressed the joint ACRRM-RDAA conference on Thursday morning and outlined some of the broad priority areas for the opposition going into the 2025 federal election.
“Can I give you an absolute commitment that, if I’m fortunate enough to be the next health minister, I won’t be asking you to submit to any more reviews,” she said.
“The time has come to stop reviewing and start doing.”
Her commitment was met with applause from the 900 rural and regional doctors in attendance.
The last few years have seen a flurry of reviews and reports, the biggest being the Strengthening Medicare Taskforce Report, which itself spawned several reviews.
“I asked the Department of Health and Aged Care to provide a list of all the reviews they were currently undertaking at estimates last year, and they declined to provide it,” Ms Ruston said.
“The reason they cited was that it would be an unacceptably large diversion of resources to do so.”
She also criticised AHPRA’s move to institute health checks for older doctors, which earned another round of applause.
Ms Ruston said she was unable to provide granular details on what the coalition’s health platform would include – “shadow treasurers take a very dim view of their shadow ministers going out and making announcements without budget approval” – but that they would address issues like workforce.
“A key focus of the coalition going forward is going to be investing in policies that foster a home-grown medical workforce,” she said.
“I accept that [international medical graduates] will be, certainly for the foreseeable future, an important component to fuel domestic workforce shortages.
“But I also want to make sure that the bulk of our workforce is trained locally, because you know more than anybody, if you train in the bush you stay in the bush.”
The South Australian Senator also said a Liberal National Party government would spend $400 million on providing supplementary payments to GP registrars and funding a portability of leave and entitlements scheme.
This initiative was announced in Opposition Leader Peter Dutton’s budget reply speech in May.
Related
Minister for Rural Health Emma McBride did not attend the conference in person.
Earlier this week, Health Minister Mark Butler hinted that Labor had some kind of announcement for primary care in the pipeline that was connected with or contingent on rising rates of bulk billing.
The Greens, meanwhile, have pledged to set up 1000 free local healthcare clinics with Commonwealth-employed GPs, dentists, nurses and psychologists and to extend the tripled bulk billing incentive to all Australians.
Rural Medicine Australia 2024 was held at the Darwin Convention Centre between October 24 and 26.
