Page 1633 - Week 05 - Wednesday, 1 April 2009
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primary health care which, in the instance that we are talking about now, is private health care.
We have had this debate in this chamber before—in fact, before Mr Hanson was here—and Mr Hanson has ignored the amount of work that has gone into this issue over a number of years. I know you will say, “Well, you’ve delivered nothing,” but the work has been done by the AMA, the Division of General Practice and the government in collaboration, recognising that this issue is an extremely complex one and cannot be fixed overnight. In fact, it cannot be fixed in the next couple of years. As much as I would love to be able to stand here and say that and for Mr Hanson to accept that, it simply will not be. That is not to say that work has not been done over a number of years; it has. If you took the time to actually do your job properly, Mr Hanson, and speak to the professional bodies and to the Division of General Practice, you would understand.
If you read the AMA’s articles on this, if you read the articles in the next edition of the newsletter of the Division of General Practice, you will start understanding the complexities of the issues we are dealing with here. Mr Hanson spent some time trying to say that we should be trying to stop closures. How on earth can we stop the closures? How can the ACT government and, indeed, the ACT Assembly, stop the closures? I will give you a little lesson here of what happened. What happened was small suburban general practices sold their businesses to a corporate provider. In fact, in this instance they sold it to Symbion. Symbion owned those businesses for a number of years, and then Symbion was sold to Primary Health Care. So now we have a whole range of suburban practices owned by Primary Health Care which, indeed, also owns the large bulk-billing practices at Ginninderra and Phillip.
Dr Ed Bateman, who heads up Primary Health Care, and his son made a business decision. They said, “We do not want to run small suburban general practices.” Now we might have very strong views about disagreeing with that, but Dr Bateman decides this and he consolidates those contracts he has with general practitioners—they have voluntarily signed up to these contracts—and consolidates his business in a metropolitan model in group centres. That is a business decision.
I challenge Mr Hanson to identify at what point the ACT government could have stopped that. You cannot identify at any point along that way any way to stop the closure. If you look at the terms of reference of the GP task force, you see that it is about looking at ways to grow the workforce in the future, ways to protect patients in the future and opportunities within the health and hospital reform commission and the national work to see about the future of general practice in the ACT.
This work is pulling together work that is already being done within ACT Health. I know Mr Hanson keeps interjecting, “Why didn’t you do this earlier?” This work has been ongoing for two to three years. That is the complexity of the issues we are dealing with that Mr Hanson simply fails to understand. He thinks you can have a task force, that it can report in six months and that, presumably, in three months time there will be no GP workforce shortage. That will not happen. But the GP task force is about—
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