CONSTITUENCY STATEMENTS

Mr LLEW O'BRIEN (Wide Bay) (10:32): I rise today to speak about petition EN10266 launched by Alecia Staines and the Maternity Consumer Network concerning professional indemnity insurance for midwives attending homebirths. The petition is now closed with almost 6,000 signatures. Those signatures represent women, families and midwives asking the Commonwealth to fix a problem of its own making before the current exemption ends on 31 December 2026.

This issue will be felt most acutely in rural and regional Australia, where maternity choices are already limited, services have been repeatedly centralised or closed and women can travel hundreds of kilometres simply to give birth. The government committed $3.5 million over four years to expand the Midwife Professional Indemnity Scheme, yet the homebirth insurance product, created through the insurer, Miga, is not fit for purpose.

It does not provide a workable insurance pathway for the many experienced registered midwives who currently act as second attendants at private homebirths. That matters, because rural and regional endorsed midwives often rely on local hospital midwives to provide that second attendant role. These are experienced clinicians who may attend only a handful of homebirths each year.

Requiring them to obtain endorsement and purchase separate insurance is simply not realistic. The inconsistency is obvious. Across Australia, publicly funded homebirth programs operate without requiring attending midwives to be endorsed.

A registered midwife is considered appropriately qualified to attend a publicly funded homebirth through a hospital service, yet from 2027, that same midwife may be unable to provide backup to a privately practising midwife because there is no suitable insurance product. The government has been presented with a solution including an organisational or group insurance model for non-endorsed second midwives.

Models already exist through the service such as Waminda and My Midwives for the Alukura Midwifery Group Practice. The Commonwealth does not need to dismantle an existing homebirth workforce in the name of insurance; it needs to ensure that workforce. For women in the metropolitan areas, these changes may reduce choice.

For women in rural and regional Australia, they remove the choice altogether. I call on the government to extend the exemption to establish a fit-for-purpose insurance pathway for registered midwives providing second attendant support. Where a woman lives should not determine whether she can access safe, supported homebirth.