CONSTITUENCY STATEMENTS

Mr CHAFFEY (Parkes) (16:35): As I travel the electorate of Parkes, which covers more than 400,000 square kilometres in New South Wales, I hear many sad stories about health and health care. I hear stories of people who need to drive hundreds of kilometres to see a specialist—and long and often anxious waits for appointments. I hear stories of people who arrive at hospitals suffering a heart attack or other frightening medical episodes only to see the emergency department is closed.

I have heard about the long hours for those who are dedicated to providing health care for regional Australians and their frustrations at the funding decisions made by the Albanese government. These stories are there in black and white in the National Rural Health Alliance's report The forgotten health spend, released earlier this year. The report shows regional Australians received approximately $8.35 billion less in healthcare funding when compared to the urban Australians.

That translates to $1,100 per person each year. The gap is widening—$110 per person over the past few years. Less money is spent in areas where more is needed.

As the report notes, the cost of delivering services is higher in remote areas. Spending in some areas, such as Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander primary health care, has actually gone backwards. Australians who live outside major cities have higher rates of hospitalisation, chronic diseases and premature and preventable deaths.

The further you live from the city, the more likely you are to die from a premature death, the report states. Health services in rural, regional and remote areas desperately need more attention. They need more funding, they need better a framework to work within and they need better incentives to attract health practitioners.

It is simply a matter of life or death in the bush. In Broken Hill I've been working closely with the Rural Doctors Network and the Broken Hill City Council to help them find some solutions to the lack of sustainable healthcare services. Official figures comparing ratios of doctors to population no longer paint the full picture, with the system making it increasingly attractive for doctors to work as locums instead of remaining in our communities.

The result is a huge increase in expense and a lack of continuity of care. Locums cannot replace day-in day-out, dedicated commitments by GPs and specialists who live and work in our communities. Nurses and other practitioners are also feeling the strain of too much expected of too few, and it's resulting in early exits from our health industry.

The Labor government is letting those practitioners and those communities down in areas where we simply cannot fail.