PRIVATE MEMBERS' BUSINESS
Mr VENNING (Grey) (11:39): I rise to talk about the motion for Medicare urgent care clinics in Australia. Let me start off by saying the level of pork-barrelling by this government with urgent Medicare clinics is unbelievable. For anyone watching at home, do some analysis of the number of urgent Medicare clinics in Labor held seats versus coalition held seats.
In fact, it's built into the very own strategy of the urgent Medicare clinics. Their strategy is to deliver an urgent Medicare clinic to 80 per cent of Australians within a 20-minute drive. Essentially they're saying that, if you are from a rural or remote community, good luck to you.
It's even worse than that. If you're in a remote community, you're paying three times to see a doctor. There will be a co-payment.
There will be an increase in your council rates, because the regional, rural and remote councils that I represent have to give cash incentives to encourage GPS into their communities because the model that we have today does not support GPS in regional, rural and remote Australia. It is completely unacceptable. I'll be a bit more specific.
I rise to bring attention to the unfolding health crisis in my electorate of Grey. It is a crisis manufactured not by a lack of dedication from our local medical professionals but by the sheer incompetence and the suffocating red tape of this government's bureaucratic machine. Right now on the Eyre Peninsula, a dedicated medical clinic is on the brink of being forced to reinstate patient co-payments.
Why is this? It is because of catastrophic ongoing failures within Services Australia's Health Professional Online Services system, better known as HPOS. For six months, the clinic has successfully operated as a bulk-billing practice providing an essential lifeline to a community doing it tough under cost-of-living pressures.
Yet, despite doing everything by the book, three vital GPs at this clinic have been repeatedly dropped off the Medicare registry due to system errors. It is completely unacceptable that the clinic has been forced to register its hard-working doctors three separate times only for the HPOS system to unceremoniously drop them without any warning whatsoever. The rigid lack of flexibility in the system means that a simple glitch completely cancels incentive payments.
This has left these healthcare providers out of pocket for at least three months, entirely stripping them of the quarterly incentive payments they rely upon to keep the doors open. This glitch places an immense strain on a practice that is simply trying to do the right thing for the community. The government campaigns continually on their healthcare credentials, yet their own system and their appalling lack of communication are actively punishing our clinics.
Our regional practices have seen absolutely zero benefit after six months of bulk-billing. Instead, they are being stonewalled. I am calling on the federal government today to intervene immediately.
The minister must grant an extenuating circumstances payment to backdate the owed funds to this clinic. We also need an urgent overhaul of this time-consuming and cumbersome payment system. If the government does not step in and reinstate the owed funds, one of the few bulk-billing clinics in our region will be forced to shift back to co-payments.
That will be a devastating blow to a community that relies on this practice for affordable, accessible health care. Beyond these technical failures, I also call out the government and the primary healthcare network for consistently overlooking the Eyre Peninsula. Port Lincoln, in particular, has been totally ignored for essential funding like strengthening Medicare grants.
Even worse, this communities has been completely bypassed in the rollout of the Medicare urgent care clinics. As I said before, there seems to be a lot of favouritism in the allocation of funding grants and new clinics under this government. Have a look for yourself.
We see that Whyalla has recently received a new urgent medical clinic, and that's fantastic. Of course, I welcome that investment in the people of Whyalla. However, there is a glaring, undeniable need in Port Lincoln.
Yet this this community was entirely overlooked. The question has to be asked: why did Whyalla get a Medicare urgent care clinic when the need was just as high, if not higher, in Port Lincoln? Port Lincoln services a vast network of smaller surrounding towns that have absolutely no access to health care.