TRANSCRIPT - DOORSTOP INTERVIEW - BRISBANE

E&OE TRANSCRIPT
DOORSTOP INTERVIEW
BRISBANE
THURSDAY, 5 SEPTEMBER 2024
 
SUBJECTS: 120,000 visits to Queensland Medicare Urgent Care Clinics; affordable, accessible healthcare; CFMEU; Coalition’s nuclear fantasy; cost of living

RENEE COFFEY, FEDERAL LABOR CANDIDATE FOR GRIFFITH: Well, it's great to be here this morning at the Urgent Care Clinic here in South Brisbane, which was opened by the Federal Government late last year. And already in that time, we've seen almost 10,000 patients through the door. What that means for the people of Griffith and for south siders is that they're receiving high quality care with no out of pocket expenses - it's all bulk-billed. And it also frees up our emergency centre at the PA, at the Mater and also at the Children's Hospital. So it's been a fantastic success. It's really great to be here today, and I'd like to introduce Senator Murray Watt to speak a little bit more about the centre.

MURRAY WATT, SENATOR FOR QUEENSLAND: Well thanks very much, Renee. Renee Coffey, who is the Labor candidate here in the electorate of Griffith, and has really hit the ground running since she was announced by the Prime Minister only a couple of weeks ago. So it's terrific to be here with you, Renee, at one of Labor's major investments here in the south side, in the electorate of Griffith.

Today, we really want to highlight a couple of things that the Albanese Labor Government is delivering - not just to south siders here in Brisbane, but right across Queensland in the healthcare space that are really helping to take cost of living pressure off Queenslanders, and also taking pressure off emergency departments like the one at the Princess Alexandra Hospital right next door to us here.

Can I thank all of the staff here at the Cornwell Street Clinic for welcoming us here today, and we're looking forward to having a look around. I remember being here not that long ago with the Prime Minister when this clinic was opened as a Medicare Urgent Care Clinic, and it's already having a great success rate in providing south siders - or really anyone who wants to turn up, whether they're from the south side, the north side, or anywhere at all - seeking good, quality, free, quick and urgent care for minor but important injuries and accidents that they might need to deal with. These Medicare Urgent Care Clinics have been designed by the Albanese Government to deal with urgent but not life threatening issues, things like burns, broken bones, other ailments like that that can't necessarily wait to the next day when someone gets into their GP service, but also aren't necessarily serious enough to bother- having people have to go to emergency departments and wait sometimes for very long times. The beauty of these Medicare Urgent Care Clinics is that any Australian can walk into them and get free, bulk-billed, quick care at a very high quality from these extremely experienced and professional clinicians and allied health staff and nurses who are based in these sorts of clinics.

And we're seeing the results in the raw numbers coming through. Across Queensland, in the less than 12 months that these clinics have been opened, there have been nearly 120,000 appointments at our Medicare Urgent Care Clinics. As Renee mentioned, it's around 10,000 at this particular clinic here in South Brisbane, and we're seeing similar numbers of Queenslanders turn up at these clinics. There's about five of them in regional centres; places like Cairns, Townsville, Rockhampton, Bundaberg and Toowoomba. And in South East Queensland, there are seven of these clinics as well. So they're doing a terrific job, all of the staff here, to provide top quality care, bulk-billed, urgently to Queenslanders who need that care, and as I say, also taking pressure off our emergency departments by providing people with a different option to get those urgent but not life threatening matters dealt with. It's a really important cost of living measure for Queenslanders as well, because, of course, when you get bulk-billed care, that care is free. And we know that Australians and Queenslanders are doing it tough at the moment. We're obviously providing cost of living relief in a wide range of ways, from the tax cuts we've provided to the energy bill relief to the cheaper medical care through places like these Urgent Care Clinics. But also by providing cheaper medicines; you will have seen that the Albanese Government has made a range of changes to medicine costs to bring down those costs for Queenslanders, and just in Queensland alone, those reductions in the cost of medicines have saved Queenslanders $88 million in the last few months. So every little bit counts when it comes to relieving cost of living pressure, whether that's tax cuts, energy prices, medicine costs or healthcare costs. These Medicare Urgent Care Clinics are playing a really important role in delivering cheaper, faster, but also very good quality care for Queenslanders who need it.

I might just introduce Dr John Adie from the clinic, who can talk to you about what it means, and then we're happy to take questions.

DR JOHN ADIE, SOUTH BRISBANE URGENT CARE CLINIC: Thank you. Grateful to Federal Labor for taking on this urgent care initiative. We're one of the last western world countries to have urgent care, and we've done that in the last 12 months thanks to Federal Labor supporting this.

With urgent care, it's for non-life threatening urgent conditions, mainly infections and injuries - that's sort of 85 percent of our work. We have doctors working from 8 in the morning till 10 at night, seven days a week. And we provide an option to emergency departments so patients that come here, they wait less, there's no cost to them, and we can provide a lot of the consumables that the ED provides and get them out the door a whole lot quicker than if they'd have to wait at ED.

So really excited about this initiative, and we're really excited about all the Urgent Care Centre that are opening around Australia. We're relating to countries like the US and also Europe and the world organization of general practice. They're very keen to hear what's happening in Australia, and we're also kind of sharing IP with them. In the United States, there's about 14,500 of these urgent care centres, so 78 percent of the population can drive to an urgent care centre within 10 minutes. And I'm hoping in Australia that with the Labor Government, Albanese clinics expanding, that Australians will have this sort of access so that patients will have an option for their non-life threatening but urgent conditions. So thank you, Senator Watt, and thank you Renee for coming out today. We really appreciate your support with this Urgent Care Clinic.

MURRAY WATT: Thanks, John. Did anyone have any questions for John before we come back to us? All good? All right, happy to take questions on this or any other matters.

JOURNALIST: Senator, [indistinct] how much would it cost the Government to incorporate full dental to Medicare? Will that be an election pledge of the next federal election?

MURRAY WATT: Yeah, there's obviously been a lot of commentary about this lately, and you may have seen that the Health Minister Mark Butler has made clear that we understand dental care is an issue for Australians, but our number one priority when it comes to Medicare is simply making sure that bulk-billing is available for Australians as widely as possible. Unfortunately, under the Coalition over 10 years, we did see bulk-billing and Medicare run down. Our primary task is to make sure that Australians can receive Medicare treatment, bulk-billed treatment, as widely as possible for the existing elements. We'll give consideration to other things down the track, but that’s our primary focus.

JOURNALIST: What’s your message to the unions that are supporting the CFMEU High Court challenge?

MURRAY WATT: Yeah, look, I mean, obviously individual unions will make their own decisions. What I would say is that the action that we've taken as a government - very justified if you look at the ongoing behaviour from officials in the CFMEU Construction Division. The action that we've taken is about one division of one union. It's not about all unions. In actual fact, our Government has been strongly supportive of the actions of trade unions across this country to work with us to deliver better pay and better conditions for all Australian workers. Unions have a vital role in Australia in making sure that workers do receive better pay, more secure work and safer workplaces, and that's why we support the union movement. But unfortunately, the behaviour of some officials in the CFMEU Construction Division went far beyond the pale and did not reflect the values of unionism. I'll leave it to individual unions to make their decisions about what they do.

JOURNALIST: Do you have a comment on Bill Shorten retiring?

MURRAY WATT: Yeah, look I've only just seen those reports now. I'm not sure whether anything has been said officially about that. I probably should leave it for Bill to make some announcements himself before I comment on those.

JOURNALIST: What do you make of the Coalition's plan to give incentives to communities that have a nuclear reactor built in them?

MURRAY WATT: Yeah well, I think it shows how desperate the Coalition is to force the most expensive form of power on regional communities around Australia that they now have to try to buy those communities off with cash payments, or whatever it is that they're going to be talking about doing. The fact is that nuclear power is the most expensive form of power that we could possibly be considering as a country at the moment. That's the reason the market isn't investing in it at the moment. We know that even under Peter Dutton's own estimates, we wouldn't be seeing a nuclear power station built in Australia until the 2040s. Now, if I travel around Australia, I meet Australians who are looking for relief on their power bills now - the kind of things that we're doing by providing energy bill rebates. People aren't asking for their bills to come down in 2040 they're asking for their bills to come down now. And the truth is that in 2040 if Peter Dutton were to build these nuclear reactors, power bills would go up significantly. It's not a solution to the problems that we have now, and that's before you even talk about the environmental risks.

JOURNALIST: So what do you make of Ted O'Brien saying nuclear would provide the cheapest energy?

MURRAY WATT: The only people who are saying that nuclear power provides the cheapest form of energy are Peter Dutton and his shadow ministers. No credible scientists are saying this. No credible energy expert is saying this. In fact, the opposite. Every energy expert in our country is saying that the cheapest way we can provide power in the future is through investing in cleaner energy, being renewable power. That's what the Albanese Government's doing. And it's just because of some ideological obsession from Peter Dutton and the LNP that they want to pursue the most expensive, slowest way of providing power that you could possibly imagine.

JOURNALIST: Do you hope Michelle Bullock cuts rates this month, and does the economy need a kickstart - lower rates?

MURRAY WATT: Well you’d be aware that our Government isn’t in the habit of giving advice to the Reserve Bank of Australia, but I think every Australian knows that household budgets are feeling real pressure as a result of interest rates going up. I've got a mortgage, probably most of you have got a mortgage, and I've seen the effect on my disposable income from those interest rate cuts. You know what we've been doing as a government is doing everything we possibly can to take pressure off inflation. It's halved since we came to office compared to what we inherited from the Coalition, by racking up budget surpluses in the way that we have two years in a row, but also providing important cost of living relief. That's the best way to take pressure off inflation and pressure off households. I note that the Coalition's response to this is to say that if they're elected, they will impose cuts of about $100 billion. They haven't yet decided what they're going to cut. Are they going to be cutting Medicare Urgent Care Clinics? Are they going to be cutting funding to health care, disability care, infrastructure spending? They say that they want to cut $100 billion from the federal budget. This is the worst possible time for a government to be imposing those kind of cuts, it would, without doubt, send the economy into recession and I don't think that's an interest of Australians.

JOURNALIST: Senator, do you have a response to John Setka’s criticism of your appointment to Workplace Relations Minister?

MURRAY WATT: Well, you know, John Setka says all sorts of things, you know, I've seen he's been out and about in Melbourne again. The fact is that John Setka doesn't hold a role in the CFMEU anymore - he's a former official. What we're about is working with the administrators who been appointed to the CFMEU Construction Division to make sure that the CFMEU is a strong and effective union for its members, but is also a clean union. And John Setka is one of the people who's done the most possible damage to his union's reputation and the reputation of the union movement overall. So I'm not too fazed by what John Setka has to say. All good? Thank you.