HOST: Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, good morning.
PM: G'day John. How are you?
HOST: This is a very good opportunity for us to have a chat about these health announcements yesterday. It's interesting, come out of the blue actually, for a lot people. Let me just quote from the Cairns Post today. It says 'the concerns of health professionals in the far north have been revealed as the driving force behind the multimillion dollar allied health package announced in Cairns yesterday'. Can you give us the bare bones of what you wanted to achieve, here?
PM: Sure. Firstly, at Cairns Base Hospital we were simply confirming that our existing 8 or $9 million investment for the upgrade of radiation oncology services at Cairns is on track, and that's on track for opening next year, and that would help about 400 cancer patients in and around Cairns at present who would otherwise have to travel elsewhere. That's one thing.
The second was this, however - allied health professionals, and these are folk like physiotherapists, dieticians, occupational therapists, optometrists. When I was last at Cairns Base Hospital for a consultation on the future of the new National Health and Hospital Network, what the locals told me is that the real problem up in the Far North is frankly, also, the undersupply of these allied health professionals, so what we've done is two things: we have doubled the number of scholarships available to allied health students to undertake clinical placement in rural and regional Australia. That's from 100 to 200 a year. That will provide an extra 1,000 scholarships over the decade to come. But, equally importantly, it's to provide allied health locums, that is, when you've got people working in these allied health areas who need to, frankly, take a holiday or they get sick, how do we support that? So, we've now, for the first time, introduced a locum placement funding arrangement which will assist in providing interim services for people who are obviously going to be out of action for four weeks a year or whatever.
HOST: 200 scholarships a year, where will they study? Where will they get their training?
PM: Well, for example, if you're looking at Far North Queensland, you'll have a number of people out there in, currently in GP-related clinics or operating, for example, out of the outreach services of Cairns Base Hospital. This is where they would obtain their placement and this is where they would be trained, but most critically, if we do this and provide this level of scholarship training in cities like Cairns, guess what? These folk are more likely to settle down there and to establish their futures there and become part and parcel of the local medical professional community as well, and I think that's great for the region.
HOST: Kevin Rudd, let me get straight to the source of concerns up here. You now have got yourself abreast of what we're trying to achieve at the hospital, for a start. Now, we've had challenges over the years, particularly trying to get specialists here. Largely, they've been overcome. We've had challenges with ramping getting into the ED, the ambulances queuing up for about, I think 11 and 12 in a row at one stage. We seem to be getting that largely under control.
However, I talked to one elderly patient yesterday. She broke her hip a few days ago. She said 'the care in our hospital is wonderful. I couldn't have wanted more, except that when I arrived in the emergency department I had to wait 10 hours for a doctor to come along and say 'this is her problem, get her to a bed' or whatever.' That is one of the really nagging problems we've got here. How will your federal Health and Hospital Network sort out those sort of problems?
PM: Well, your question is excellent and right on the money, because so many people across Australia are finding themself in that circumstance, basically being delayed in the emergency department before they get onto, frankly, the treatment they need, either within the hospital or back home if it's a minor condition.
So, what are we going to do about it? When we talk about a new National Health and Hospitals Network, we're talking about one which will be funded nationally and run locally. That means that we would, for the first time as the Australian Government, be the exclusive funder of what's called primary health care - that's GP and GP-related services, for the first time the dominant funder of the running costs and the capital costs of hospitals like Cairns Base, and also the exclusive funder of aged care.
What we mean by, however, having a system funded nationally but run locally is that Cairns Base Hospital would, therefore, as the centre of a local hospital network, have much greater autonomy in the way in which run their services as well, and we would fund them directly, as the Australian Government. Now, that means that they can make better and more local decisions about how to improve the efficiency of their emergency department, how they improve the efficiency of their elective surgery arrangements, how they deal with sub-acute beds as well.
But, on top of that, we're not just creating, as it were, a better funded system - we're also right now intervening to provide extra support for accident and emergency and for elective surgery to improve those services now, but none of it can happen, John, unless we've got enough doctors and enough nurses and enough allied health professionals, and the last thing I'd just say about that is that's why about two weeks ago the Health Minister and I announced that we'll be funding over the decade ahead an additional 6,500 doctors, GPs and specialists, a large concentration on rural and regional Australia, because unless we deal with the medical workforce shortage, we can have as many buildings and as many machines as we like, but unless we've actually got more doctors and more nurses and more allied health professionals, it won't work.
HOST: I don't want to labour this issue, but the previous government established a system where we've got more doctors going through the universities now. I would imagine they'll be coming onstream in, I don't know what, two years or something, the first of those numbers. Now you're saying 'we'll we've got to get many more hundreds or thousands of doctors out there.' Tell me why the previous arrangements aren't providing enough or aren't going to provide enough?
PM: Well, let me just go to the core if it. When Mr Abbott was Health Minister for the previous five years up until the last election, they actually froze the number of GP training places. What's that mean? It means that sure, you might have people graduating from university, albeit in not enough numbers, but there weren't funded training places for them in hospitals or in GP clinics around the country to actually make the best use of the skills that they'd acquired.
The number of, for example, when I was at Cairns Base Hospital only nine months ago, I had a couple of young fellas come up to me and say 'we're currently three or four years in but we have no guaranteed place at all, either as a hospital intern or to train as a GP. What are we going to do?' So, you ask why we have therefore increased radically the number of GP training places and specialist training places? It's to fill that gap, but also to expand the number over time, because we've also got an aging medical workforce at present, and unless we plug that, frankly, we're not going to get better health and better hospital services for critical regions like Far North Queensland.
HOST: Just quickly, you were here yesterday, you chose not to meet those protestors. I've got to tell you it's fairly rare that we have a protest in Cairns, so I would imagine they've got something fairly meaty to take up with you, but you did send your chief executive out, who gave them his ear for some time and promised to get back to them. The one issue he seemed to pick up on, according to people who were there, was the excessive spending on these various locations on the northern beaches, and also the density of the public housing developments at Earlville.
Is there an opportunity, Kevin Rudd, of you perhaps sending your Housing Minister, Tanya Plibersek, up here to meet with these people and get to the core of the excessive spending? I mean to say, the overspend, according to these people, is unbelievable. They say there's land available at Smithfield, for example, $350,000-$400,000, whereas you paid virtual waterfront land, I think the price was $1.35 million at Palm Cove, was over a million at Bluewater Harbour, where there was land that was more appropriate for this sort of development up the road for $500,000. Could she have a close look at these claims?
PM: Well, if the locals have concerns about this, and my Chief of Staff did spend time with them yesterday, then of course they should provide those concerns in writing to the Federal Housing Minister, then we'll work out where the line of responsibility lies.
Can I just back back a bit in terms of why we are investing in social housing in the first place? One, there's a shortage of affordable housing in Far North Queensland and in and around Cairns. Two, because of, frankly, the huge impact of the global recession on your economy there where you've already got unemployment in double digits, we, as the Australian Government, decided to step in and invest some $435 million in stimulus projects right across the broader Cairns region. That includes $59 million of investment in social housing, but also includes massive investment in local schools, as well, and that's to provide jobs for the construction industry which was about to fall through the floor, and frankly make unemployment in Far North Queensland that much worse. But, on the practicalities of the planning decisions that you raised, John, sure, get them to provide that, their concerns, direct to the Housing Minister.
HOST: You have to get that organised quickly. I mean to say, this work is on the verge of starting. There is a very short-term moratorium, I understand, in place, but it's pretty shaky.
The other figure, too, there's a quote here from a builder for this-
PM: -I think what we've done, John, overall, with these sorts of things, is that remember the strategic objective was to keep this economy going, and I'm very concerned about, frankly, an unemployment rate of 12 percent in Cairns, and I'd be very concerned about what it would be if we weren't investing in stimulus projects during this global impact a very tourism-exposed local economy.
HOST: Oh, very much so, but these people are concerned about the money you're spending that needn't be spent. I've got a quote here for less than $3 million for 19 units. Apparently you're spending $5.7 million.
PM: What I was about to go on to say, John, is that, therefore, in the implementation of this, when any issues arise, each of the relevant ministers has an audit mechanism available to quickly look at any problems which arrive. It is inevitable, across the country, that you're going to have implementation difficulties. What we have is an audit mechanism to look at these problems as they arise. That's why I'd encourage the locals to get that in to Minister Plibersek straight away.
HOST: Yep, and thanks for your time on the program today.
PM: Appreciate it very much, John. Good to be back in Cairns