THE HON SUSSAN LEY MP

DEPUTY LEADER OF THE OPPOSITION

SHADOW MINISTER FOR INDUSTRY, SKILLS AND TRAINING

SHADOW MINISTER FOR SMALL AND FAMILY BUSINESS

SHADOW MINISTER FOR WOMEN

FEDERAL MEMBER FOR FARRER

SENATOR THE HON ANNE RUSTON

SHADOW MINISTER FOR HEALTH AND AGED CARE

SHADOW MINISTER FOR SPORT

SENATOR FOR SOUTH AUSTRALIA

TRANSCRIPT

PRESS CONFERENCE
ALBURY WODONGA HEALTH HOSPITAL, ALBURY CAMPUS

7 December 2022

E&OE……………………………………

SUSSAN LEY:

Good morning. I'm delighted to be here at Albury Wodonga Health's main facility in Albury with Senator Anne Ruston, our Shadow Minister for Health, Aged Care and Sport in what has been a very busy couple of days and I will hand over to Senator Ruston in a moment.

But first I'd like to make some comments regarding the crisis that is facing every single Australian when it comes to energy and cost of living. Today, Wednesday, National Cabinet was supposed to have met. We wish the Prime Minister a speedy recovery from COVID and of course we hope that his symptoms remain mild. We also note that millions of Australians have contracted COVID and many are contracting it and suffering from COVID every day and while we're here at a hospital, I want to thank our hard working doctors and nurses for supporting patients with COVID every single day.

But I'm also pleased that the Prime Minister, and the Government, bowed to Opposition pressure to actually hold a National Cabinet meeting, albeit it is on Friday, this week. Because it is vital that National Cabinet meets and that this Prime Minister delivers the solutions to the energy and cost of living crisis, that Australians were promised, before Christmas.

Australians were promised relief from rising energy prices, from cost of living pressures and of course real wages increases, it is clear that wages are in fact not outpacing inflation. So three broken promises from this government. Your power bill was going to go down by $275 for households and businesses. You were promised cheaper mortgages, in fact, a typical mortgage repayment, with now the RBA cash rate at 3.1 per cent is rising to over $1,400 a month, and you were promised that your wage would outpace inflation, where in fact we're seeing the opposite. Real wages are going down. So it is absolutely vital that this Friday's meeting, and of course it can happen virtually, of the Prime Minister and state premiers delivers cost of living relief for Australians.

The Opposition is out and about on the ground across rural and regional Australia, which is very close to my heart and very close to Senator Ruston’s heart as a fellow rural and regional member. So I'm delighted Anne that you have been able to spend a couple of days here to talk about critical issues for our country. That includes aged care, hospital services, medical services, GPs, primary care, and how we get the best for our communities here in this part of Australia. So thank you for your visit, and I'll hand over to you.

SENATOR ANNE RUSTON:

Thank you very much and it's fantastic to be here in the Albury Wodonga area and have the opportunity to see firsthand the health services and the aged care services that are provided to the local community here. Thank you very much to so many people who have taken the time to meet with me to give me their firsthand experience about what's going on on the ground here.

As Sussan said, I'm also from rural and regional Australia. I come from a small community in the Riverland in South Australia. And the one thing that continues to strike me is that despite the fact that we think that we should have equity of health services and health outcomes for people who live outside of metropolitan areas, the further you get away from a capital city the worse the outcomes are. The services are certainly not equitable compared to those for our city cousins.

So I'm very keen to work with rural, regional, and remote communities to understand how we can develop health and aged care services and facilities that enable all Australians to be able to get access to the same level of health care no matter where they live in the country. And that may be that we look at different models of care. It may be that we look to make sure that we've got good investment in the facilities and resources in rural and regional Australia, which is why I was delighted to have the opportunity to come to the Albury Hospital this morning to talk to them about what their plans are to make sure that the hospital services in this area are fit for purpose and are delivering for this community what this community deserves.

But, of course, as we know, across the whole of Australia, in just about every area of employment, we're suffering from workforce shortages. So we know that workforce shortages are more being more acutely felt, particularly in the health and care sectors, in rural and regional Australia. I was extraordinarily disappointed in July this year to see the first move of the new government when it came to trying to address issues of doctor shortages was to actually make changes to the distribution priority areas which see the incentives that were put in place for doctors, particularly international medical graduates, to move to rural and regional Australia, because they were incentivised to do so, now being able to move straight into our city areas.

So I am very keen to work with rural and regional and remote Australia to understand how we can put solutions and measures in place so that we can get equity of health outcomes for all Australians. Because I believe intrinsically that every Australian has the right to access to the same level of health and aged care services no matter where they live in the country. Thank you.

JOURNALIST:

So what would you be pushing the Government to do to make it more equitable for health care in rural Australia?

SENATOR ANNE RUSTON:

Well, I think you have to put the same sort of priority on the decisions that you're making around rural regional and remote communities. You know, to make sure that the investments into the infrastructure are commensurate with the kind of investments that we see in city communities. I mean, obviously, the fact that we have seen some funding allocated for the upgrading of this facility is good news. But I certainly think that we need to continually be pushing to make sure that there's more investment. We also need to make sure that we understand that there are unique challenges in rural regional and remote Australia. And so the solutions that may will work in the metropolitan area, are not necessarily going to work in rural regional and remote areas. And in fact, the solutions in a regional area may not be the same as the ones in a rural area, that may not be the same as the ones in a remote area. So we have to be flexible, we have to be innovative. And we actually have to make sure that we are addressing the issues of the individual communities and not applying a one size fits all model because we know that will always inevitably benefit city locations over those that are more remote from the cities.

JOURNALIST:

What are you hearing from people you've been speaking to up here? What are the major issues people are bringing to your attention?

SENATOR ANNE RUSTON:

Well, clearly workforce is the number one issue on everybody's lips at the moment and that's not just in healthcare that's across the whole care sector. Making sure that we've got pathways for training, making sure that we've got skilling opportunities, making sure that we know we are focusing our immigration programs to fill the gaps that are there in our in our workforce. It's got to be short term solutions, medium term solutions and long term solutions.

I think the other really critical issue is obviously a general practice workforce. We know that the absolute fundamental underlying foundation of our healthcare system in Australia is primary care. We need to make sure we’re focusing much more strongly on preventative care, early intervention, early and early diagnosis, it is clear COVID has exacerbated that because of the deferred care.

So I think we need the Government to be very much focused in rural and regional areas is to make sure that it is providing solutions that are addressing immediate issues. But workforce is absolutely front of mind for just about everybody else spoken to since I've been here.

JOURNALIST:

There's some significant findings that have come out about elective surgery as well at really a 10 year low the amount of patients that are being seen, what's going wrong?

SENATOR ANNE RUSTON:

Well, I mean, clearly COVID meant that there was a huge amount of deferred care because elective surgery largely didn't occur for a period of time. So we're now seeing that when people are presenting, they're obviously they're at a much more advanced stage in their health prognosis. So you know, we've got that backlog of deferred care that we expect the Government to deal with.

But we also have, I think, a great deal of concern amongst the community about going into our health settings. We continue to see surges of COVID, we see one right now, and the impact of that is of course there is a reticence for elective surgery.

But you know, the Government has to stop admiring this problem. We all know that there is a deferred care challenge. We know that there is an elective surgery challenge. And so what we need is for the Government to put a plan in place that starts to address what we know is coming down the pipeline and what is already here, we've seen some, you know some tragic news stories this week about children being affected by this. So I think we do need very much to make sure that we've got a plan to address this going forward. But we also need to recognise that there will be no one solution to this, it has to be a broad range of solutions.

So I call on all of the governments that are involved in the delivery of health and care to Australians to actually sit down, put down the guns, and the talk about cost shifting that we always seem to spend most of our time focusing on, and actually think about delivery of a plan for Australians to get us through what will be the residual impact of COVID after three years of great disturbance in the health and care sectors.

JOURNALIST:

There's obviously been a lot of debate around here in relation to a new hospital and having an expanded hospital and the New South Wales and Victorian governments have announced that they're having an expanded hospital, there is a lot of debate about what role the Federal Government should have in funding that and so forth. What role do you think the Federal Government should have in hospital funding and capital expenditure and so on?

SENATOR ANNE RUSTON:

I mean, obviously, I would be listening to the local community and, and asking them to come forward with what they want for their community because I think the most important thing is that the services in the community reflect the needs and the wants of the local community. So if the community would like additional assistance, I would like to think that the Federal Government would be open to speak to them. But, I'm not across all of the details of what's happening here. But clearly from the discussions I've had so far, there is a great concern that that the hospital facilities in this particular area are certainly not commensurate with facilities in other similar areas around the country. And I don't think that's good enough. My door is always open, anybody can walk through my door and talk about what they would like in their community. But of course, the Government of the day has to respond to the demands of the community.

JOURNALIST:
Do you have a view in that in terms of where the Federal Government should get involved in that type of spending for new hospitals or that something should be left entirely to the state?

SENATOR ANNE RUSTON:
Well, the fundamental responsibility for hospitals is the purview of state and territory governments. The Federal Government makes a significant contribution every year towards the hospital funding. That is something that obviously will continue. In relation to capital funding there's always opportunities for state and territory governments and for communities to come to the Federal Government to seek for additional funding to make sure that their facilities are fit for purpose for their communities. And I would encourage this community if that's what they want the Federal Government should be at least prepared to listen to a case that's put forward around the delivery of services, but fundamentally, state and territory governments do have responsibility for hospital services. So we will certainly be expecting that the two state governments would be backing in anything that came from the community.

JOURNALIST:
Sussan, can I ask you a question on that? Since now the Victorian election is over, the plan between the New South Wales and Victorian premiers is locked in, do you accept that's going to be the state of play now with what we're going to get in terms of a hospital?

SUSSAN LEY:

I welcome the funding that was promised by both New South Wales and Victoria but I don't see that as sufficient for this entire facility on a sustainable basis, longer term. So I see it as an important first, second and maybe third tranche. But of course, more is needed if we are to build the vision of so many of the community, which is to have a facility that links with tertiary education, that provides excellence of care across the region, and that meets what Senator Ruston has described as equity of access and standard of care for every single Australian.

JOURNALIST:
So from that point of view, you're going to lobby the Federal Government or what sort of role do you sort of see for yourself there as it goes forward?

SUSSAN LEY:
I want to see where the $450 million that was promised by both premiers lands in terms of a clinical service plan. We don't have that yet. I want to see that and I want to see whether there's an opportunity for that funding to be built on through further channels from each state government which would make sense.

Thank you.

ENDS