Mildura electorate health care
Ms CUPPER (Mildura) (14:23): My question is for the Minister for Health. My electorate has secured great wins in health care during this term thanks to strong community advocacy and a government that has listened to us. We are on the edge of achieving a trifecta that has never been achieved in a single term, at least to my knowledge, and that is: bringing a privatised hospital back to public management, securing the funding for a master plan for redevelopment and securing the capital funding to fulfil that master plan. We have two out of three—maybe 2½ if you count the election commitment made by the opposition, but an opposition promise does not count for much unless they win government. Our electorate needs certainty. We need a funding commitment from the government in line—
Members interjecting.
The SPEAKER: Order! I am having trouble hearing the question.
Ms CUPPER: with the recommendations of the master plan. We were told the master plan would be released in mid-August. Today is 31 August. When will the master plan be released?
Ms THOMAS (Macedon—Minister for Health, Minister for Ambulance Services) (14:24): I thank the independent member for Mildura for her question. I would like to begin by acknowledging her strong advocacy every step of the way for her community, the beautiful Mallee and Sunraysia districts up there. The independent member for Mildura has worked very hard to ensure that the people of that community have a strong voice in this place. With the work of the member for Mildura, the Andrews Labor government has been able to return the Mildura base hospital to public hands, absolutely where it belongs. It should always have been there. It should never have been privatised.
Ms Settle: Who did that?
Ms THOMAS: Fancy that! It was a hospital privatised by a former Liberal-Nationals government, because that is their approach to public health care. Since returning the hospital to public hands we have been working closely with the health service and with the member for Mildura to ensure that we are planning for the future needs of the Mildura and Mallee communities. The 2021–22 budget did include that $2.1 million to develop a master plan for the Mildura Base Public Hospital. I want the member to know that that work is very well underway and is very close to being finalised. I look forward to having more to say shortly in relation to this once the work is finalised. Importantly I look forward to continuing to work with the independent member for Mildura in doing all that we can to ensure that the people of Mildura, the Mallee and Sunraysia region get the very best health care, the health care that they need.
I might make this one final point: we will do the work to get it right. When our government makes a commitment you can be sure that it is appropriately funded, that we have planned it with the community, we have done the clinical service planning—there are no half-baked promises here—and most importantly of all we will have a plan to deliver the workforce, because at the end of the day we all know it is nurses, doctors, ambos, allied healthcare professionals that are the ones that deliver health care, and we will make sure that we work with the member for Mildura to deliver that.
Ms CUPPER (Mildura) (14:27): For more than a decade the federal coalition government performed poorly on rural health care. It froze the Medicare rebates for five years, undermining the viability of GP clinics and the attractiveness of general practice as a career. New rules about supervisor ratios were changed to improve the quality of practice; however, little to no effort was made to prepare for the inevitable service vacuum that would occur when bulk-billing clinics like Tristar became unviable, so here we are. In Mildura the closure of Tristar has left at least 15 000 patients without a GP. When they need medical care they will be fronting up to the hospital. Mildura’s hospital building was built for profit, not patients. It was never big enough in the first place, let alone now, and it is about to be overrun. Short-term emergency solutions to the crisis are being discussed with the federal and state governments, but the medium and longer term solutions are going to require a bigger, better Mildura Base Public Hospital to underpin them all. Can we rely on your government to deliver it?
Ms THOMAS (Macedon—Minister for Health, Minister for Ambulance Services) (14:28): I thank the member for Mildura again for her question. She is absolutely right: it is not good enough that the people of Mildura are now without access to GPs because of nine years of neglect by the former Liberal-National federal government. The local member up there, National Party member Dr Anne Webster, should hang her head in shame that this situation has been able to develop under her watch with the Liberal-National federal government, completely neglectful of communities just like Mildura. Our government is doing all that it can and will work with the college of general practitioners, with the Murray Primary Health Network, with the local hospital and indeed with my federal Parliament counterpart, the Minister for Health, to do all we can to ensure that we can deliver on primary care for the people of Mildura.