PRIVATE MEMBERS' BUSINESS

Mr REBELLO (McPherson) (11:09): This motion is about urgent care clinics. I represent the southern Gold Coast, in the seat of McPherson, which is one of the fastest growing parts of the world, and it's one of the fastest growing parts of Australia for sure. We're seeing a lot of changes happening through migration within the country, and a lot of people are moving to McPherson for a number of reasons.

But I will say this. McPherson doesn't have an urgent care clinic. So, while the government is moving a motion here today about urgent care clinics, we on the southern Gold Coast don't have access to urgent care clinics.

A point that I've raised in this parliament a number of times is that, if you look at the distribution of urgent care clinics, Labor electorates are about 3.5 times more likely to have two or more clinics. Perhaps that's why the people on the southern Gold Coast are missing out—because they don't vote for the Labor Party. I find that to be quiet remarkable because coalition electorates are, generally speaking, larger and more regional.

The median coalition held electorate is 39.5 times larger than the median Labor held electorate. The fact that we don't have a Medicare urgent care clinic is both unfair and disappointing. While the Gold Coast has clinics at Oxenford and Southport, there isn't one in Burleigh, in Palm Beach, in Currumbin, in Coolangatta, in Tugun or in Robina.

What it actually looks like is a health rollout that is not a health rollout. It looks like it's taxpayer-funded clinic confetti that's sprinkled across friendly seats, because ultimately that's what it is. There's a more basic problem here.

It's not clear that these clinics are even achieving what they were set up to do, and that is to reduce pressure on other parts of our health system. The government's own evaluation says that there's no clear evidence that urgent care clinics have improved emergency department waiting times or the proportion of urgent-care-equivalent emergency department patients seen on time.

I say in this place that there is another point that we need to raise. Urgent care clinics were not supposed to replace GPs. They were supposed to supplement the work of GPs and also the public health system.

But what we're seeing is a government that hasn't invested adequately in supporting GPs. I look at McPherson, and on the southern Gold Coast we have a situation where bulk-billing has gone down. It's gone down ever since this Labor Party came into office, and it's gone down by around 12 per cent.

So, if we're looking at our health system more broadly, while this government has focused this motion on speaking about urgent care clinics—which, by the way, we don't have in McPherson, as I've said—we don't even have an investment that is meaningfully addressing the issues with accessing health care in my seat. Although the Prime Minister comes into parliament and speaks to the media and says, 'All you need is your Medicare card,' I think the experience of the people on the southern Gold Coast and others around the country is that the reality is very different.

The reality is that they are struggling to see a doctor. They are finding it hard to get access to a GP. What the government is doing today is putting the cart before the horse.

We're seeing the government doing the victory lap without seeing the results. I would like to see this government coming in here and telling us what its plan is for how it's going to actually address the situation that Australians are facing, which is that they can't get the health care they need when they need it. While there may be a role for urgent care clinics—although, as I've said, I don't have one in my electorate—they cannot be used to fill in for the government's failures in other parts of our healthcare system.

The coalition have always said we support Medicare, and we support bulk-billed care as well. But what we don't support is self-congratulation dressed up as health policy. Like I said, this looks less like a health rollout and more like taxpayer-funded clinic confetti sprinkled across friendly Labor seats.

We support health infrastructure, not political infrastructure, because Australians need real access, real doctors and real accountability, not self-congratulation and pork-barrelling.