The first thing that all Australians would love in their town is an Australian doctor. And if they can’t get an Australian doctor, the next best thing is a foreign doctor.

It’s a real worry for people in regional Australia that if you or your child gets sick, there simply is no doctor there.

Now the Australian Medical Association might say that there are too many doctors coming on line, but maybe they all live in Double Bay.



That’s not the case at Thargomindah or Cloncurry, where 457 visas are very important; or in places like St George, where they try and try to get the right skills for the right jobs in the local area. But they just can’t get them. These skills do exist in Australia. But they don’t always exist among people who want to move to regional areas.



The only way we can attract people to many of these towns is if the business structure is complete and furnished with all the rights skills at all the right levels. And foreign workers are often necessary for that. People in regional towns expect that. There is no animosity.

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Take Emerald, which isn’t that remote, and yet it relies on 457s. In other areas, there are no doctors at all. This infuriates people because they know that doctors will go to places like Sydney where they are stumbling over one another, that there is a doctor surplus in certain areas, and a complete lack of doctors in others.

Unfortunately Medicare numbers are given to doctors, not to locations, and I haven’t heard anyone say that policy should change. And no one is proposing a policy change that Medicare numbers go to places not people.

If doctors wanted to spread themselves evenly across the country, then we would all probably be OK. But they don’t. The best way we can find and train doctors for a regional area is for them to get their tertiary degree in a regional area.

A doctor who gets his degree at the University of New England, for example, is more likely to have broken the ice and is not fearful about working in a regional town.

In abattoirs, too, there are certain jobs that others just won’t do.



Do you want to pack offal, or the smelly guts of a cow? Do you want to bone out skulls, do a bovine form of “alas poor Yorick”? No you don’t.

Most people would want to work as the accountant at the abattoir or one of the other higher level jobs. But someone has to do these unpopular jobs if the abattoir is to work properly. And when people come in from overseas to do it, the town is happy, the abattoir is working, and people have jobs.

In Rockhampton, the number of meat workers on 457 visas has actually gone down. What happened? Well, these 457 workers wanted to become Australians and constructive members of the community: buying houses, bringing up their kids. And that’s exactly what happened.

Most Australians are very hard working. There are some people – and I emphasise a small number of some people – who, to be frank, don’t want to work. The overwhelming numbers of Australians want to work, and they work very hard.

I’m not a social worker being paid to determine why someone thinks that sitting around getting fat and playing video games is a better outcome than having a job. And I’m not going to close down the local abattoir by trying to discover a solution or a reason.

That’s why I believe in decentralisation – it is an active process of expanding the opportunity and social texture of regional cities and towns. Because people attract people.

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Once upon a time people would have thought you were asking a doctor for his second kidney to move to Canberra. Now so many people want to move to Canberra because of the social infrastructure and social improvement that has been created there.

This is why the Nationals have fought for the Australian Pesticides and Veterinary Medicines Authority (APVMA) to go to Armidale; why the Rural Industries Development Corporation is going to Wagga; and why the Grain Research Development Corporation is going to Toowoomba, Dubbo and other places.

When I lived in St George one of the local doctors was from New Guinea; now that I live in Tamworth one of the local doctors is from Iran; and my own doctor is a South African. The list goes on.

The 457 visa program should be a demand-driven program. If the demand is there and the visa holders go to regional areas, then they are growing Australia’s regional economy. When a home grown workforce is either unavailable or reluctant to move to regional Australia, we don’t see 475 visa holders as a threat, we see them as a benefit.