Senator WEBBER (3:21 PM) —I also rise to take note of answers given by Senator Patterson. In doing so, I would like to focus on the debacle that her health policies inflicted on my home state of Western Australia. Since this government has been in office, and particularly in her time as health minister, the proportion of bulk-billing general practitioner services in WA has decreased from 79.8 per cent in 1996-97 to 66.1 per cent in 2002-03. That is a massive decline. What is the major contributor to a decline in bulk-billing? It is the lack of access to GP services—the lack of access to doctors.

In Western Australia the shortages of GPs are most severe in the outer Perth metropolitan areas, such as Ellenbrook—and I will come back to the case of Ellenbrook shortly—Clarkson, Merriwa, Mindarie, Quinns Rocks and Butler, as well as some of the rural and remote areas. But some of our newest suburbs are missing out because Senator Patterson, when she was the Minister for Health and Ageing, refused to provide adequate incentives for doctors to practise in those communities.

Many of our rural and regional communities also do not have access to private GPs, with people instead being forced to rely on public hospitals—which is something else the minister neglected to adequately resource. In the Kimberley and Pilbara regions—regions that will be familiar to Senator Cook—there were fewer than 10 private GPs for a population of over 80,000 people. This government's lack of policy response to the provision of GP services—and, particularly, the former minister's lack of policy response to the provision of GP services—in rural and remote areas forces 80,000 people in the Kimberley and Pilbara regions to rely on state provided public hospitals to access their medical care.

Another great thing due to Senator Patterson's complete mismanagement of the health system is the lack of funding in the current health care agreement. Due to her cutting funding that was alluded to by Senator Forshaw earlier, more than 25,000 Western Australians could now miss out on public health treatment, thanks to the federal government's funding arrangements that Senator Patterson introduced. For Western Australia the new funding arrangements mean that there will be at least $80 million less spent in our public hospital system over the next four financial years, thanks to Senator Patterson. As I say, that can translate to more than 25,000 patients not getting the treatment that they need and deserve.

But let us focus on the minister's package that will supposedly get GPs to service outer metropolitan, rural and remote areas. Let us have a look at some of the comments from the Perth and Hills Division of General Practice. The division has advertised widely to get a GP to practise in the suburb of Ellenbrook. Ellenbrook, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics March report, has the fastest growing population in Australia. From 1996 to 2001, it has grown by 847 per cent. There are now approximately 5,500 young families living in the area of Ellenbrook. They do not have one GP to service them. They are all forced to travel widely or to rely on the Swan District Hospital.

The Perth and Hills Division of General Practice have had a look at the package that was proposed by Senator Patterson. They have advised that it will have absolutely no impact on the provision of GPs in that area and that there is no incentive for a GP to actually move out to Ellenbrook to practise. They say there is far too much red tape in the entire package and that it is hard to find out which GPs will be eligible for assistance under her package and which ones will not. The package does not make a distinction for a medium-size community like that—the community is too large to set up a sole practice, yet it is not large enough to attract anyone from the corporate medical sector—and, therefore, the package is completely irrelevant to its needs.

The other thing the former Minister for Health and Ageing was famous for is this. Remember the dramatic demise in bulk-billing and the heated disagreement because she was starving our public hospital systems of adequate resources? What was the minister's response to that? Remember when she decided to change the language? (Time expired)

Question agreed to.