DAVE COCHRANE, PRESENTER: I’ve got the Member for Shortland, Pat Conroy with me this morning. I thought let’s find out all of the details about what was said by the Opposition Leader yesterday. Pat, good morning to you. Happy New Year!
PAT CONROY, MEMBER FOR SHORTLAND: Happy New Year to you too.
COCHRANE: So tell me, how was this? I believe it was quite a busy morning, busy presentation from the Opposition Leader?
CONROY: It was. It was a packed room – well as packed as you can in COVID times with appropriate social distancing – and it really was a great speech where Albo made three really important commitments to our area. The first one being $500 million to begin construction – if we win government – on the high speed rail connection between Sydney and Newcastle which would be the first stage of high speed rail from Melbourne to Brisbane. And this is really important. People are cynical about high speed rail because people have talked about it a lot and funded studies, but this is the first time a political party has actually allocated serious cash to actually start building the thing, and that’s what Albo announced yesterday.
COCHRANE: Pat, it’s not a new scheme. It’s something that’s been thought about for quite a while, going back – we were talking about it on talkback radio and people were saying this is something that goes back to Kevin Rudd and even before then. Why is it so important for Anthony Albanese to look towards this now?
CONROY: Well it’s about providing an economic vision for our country and our region where people can see how they’re going to get good paying, secure jobs, but still maintain a lifestyle that they love. And Albo as Infrastructure Minister in the Rudd Government spent a lot of time and a lot of money doing really important studies to make sure that this is practical, and the business case came out and said yes it can work, you just need a government that will back it in.
And the beauty of this is if we’re 90 minutes from Sydney, that means people’s quality of life will improve massively. They can commute to Sydney if that’s what they want. Obviously there’s a lot of well-paying jobs in Sydney, more so than our region, but they can have the great lifestyle up here. They don’t have to leave at the crack of dawn. Ninety minutes is at least an hour shorter than the current commute, possibly even an hour and a half depending on where you are, so we’re giving people up to three hours of their life back and improving economic outcomes for our region.
COCHRANE: Pat, one thing I do like is that the Opposition Leader does see the incredible growth in population that’s happening in our area.
CONROY: Oh absolutely, and you’ve got two options. You can either try and create the jobs around where people live – and that’s something we are aiming to do with our $15 billion National Reconstruction Fund to bring manufacturing back home – but if you look at how global economic have developed, most of the jobs have been developed within 10 kilometres of the big CBDs, the global cities like Sydney and Melbourne. So if we can get high speed rail, people can live up here with the great lifestyle that we all love, our kids can be raised in a really brilliant, safe environment, but people can still commute to Sydney for good paying jobs.
COCHRANE: Pat, if I can give you some feedback from talkback radio here on 2HD yesterday and across the Super Radio Network, one of the major concerns which was posed about the high speed rail is the logistics of doing it. How are you going to be able to get a fast service to go on the landscape that we have between here, the mountainous Central Coast area, the Hawkesbury region?
CONROY: Well that’s why Albo when he was Infrastructure Minister spent $30 million on an independent study and business case to work out how it will work, and basically it goes slightly inland. So you don’t, to use the Central Coast as an example, you don’t got onto the flat around sort of the Woy Woy peninsular. You stay at the level where Somersby and Mangrove Mountain are, and you track that side of the Central Coast and you track the western side of Lake Macquarie. And so the terminus, the Newcastle station will be not in town, not in Hamilton or somewhere. It will be somewhere around Cameron Park or slightly further towards Newcastle like that. So it’s actually where the population is, and it’s one where it makes total sense in terms of the geography.
But the key thing is, the study has found that for significant investment by the Government, that will return for taxpayers, we can be 90 minutes from Sydney. And I know people are skeptical because this has been talked about for a long, long time, but as I said, Labor is the first party at an election saying we will allocate serious cash to start building it. $500 million to improve the quality of life for our people and improve the job opportunities.
COCHRANE: Pat, one more thing on the fast-track rail that we are talking about. The other thing that leaves people with a bad taste in their mouth in Newcastle with rail is where we are at the moment. We had a great rail service right through to Newcastle. It now stops short of that at Hamilton and we have a light rail system in pace. You can see where people are a little strange, a little iffy about rail and Newcastle and an association there.
CONROY: Well we got ripped off. We got ripped off by Macquarie Street. They sold our Port, and they promised that we would get half of the proceeds. Well we didn’t get half of the $1.7 billion. We got $400 or $500 million, and then they wasted most of it ripping up two kilometres of rail line to put another two kilometres of light rail in. It was a total dud deal, and certainly in my region in Lake Macquarie, we could have used that money to build much needed infrastructure.
So I understand why people are very angry about that, but this is the opposite. We’re not ripping up rail. We are building high speed rail to improve transport connections for our community, and it’s visionary. Like, whenever I talk to people on the street about what they want out of Government whether they’re Labor or Liberal, whatever, they don’t care about political parties, they want Governments, political parties with a plan and a vision. They want to return to the past of the John Curtins and the Ben Chifleys of the world who said ‘we’ve got a vision for this country. This is our plan, this is how we fund it, and we are going to make this joint a better place for your kids’, and that’s what this announcement is all about.
COCHRANE: Pat, something else that’s very important to us in Newcastle and the Hunter is health. If you could stay with me for a moment, I’ll just clear some ads because I really need to find out the commitment from the Opposition on Hunter GP Access After Hours medical. Can we talk about that after this ad break?
CONROY: Absolutely.
[AD BREAK]
COCHRANE: Something else that’s very important for Novocastrians is our health, and the Hunter GP Access After Hours medical service, that was also discussed and was on the table yesterday was it Pat?
CONROY: It was, because unfortunately the Liberals have cut $2 million from this service which means that one of the five clinics at the Mater has been cut, and operating hours at the other After Hours clinics including Belmont in my electorate have been cut dramatically, and that’s had a massive impact. Those cuts occurred on Christmas Eve quite bizarrely, and it’s a hugely important issue because every Hunter family I know has used the GP Access After Hours service for themselves or their kids.
COCHRANE: Pat, what’s the promise from the Opposition Leader should he get in Government for this?
CONROY: So we’ve promised, Labor has promised that if we’re elected, we will save the service, we will restore the $2 million, and we will make sure that the funds are available for it to go back to operating at its previous level. This service sees 70,000 people over the phone or in person each year, and it has a huge impact on people being able to see a doctor for free, especially late at night or on weekends, and it takes huge pressure off our emergency departments. For example, when the one at Belmont had to close because some staff got sick, the waiting time at the Belmont emergency department blew out immediately from two and a half hours to six hours. So this is a really important service for our community. For that $2 million investment, we will save $22 million in health costs a year, so this is great news for Hunter families that if Labor is elected we will save the GP Access After Hours service.
COCHRANE: Pat, a little bit of feedback for you from yesterday from our talkback callers, there are concerns for the future of Medicare. There’s concerns from Novocastrians about being able to bulk-bill, being able to get into a bulk-billing clinic because it’s so difficult now. There’s becoming less and less of them, and the ones that are there are closed off because they’ve got their books fully booked. Your thoughts on this?
CONROY: Oh I am talking to people every day about this issue. We’ve been hit by the triple whammy of health cuts by this Government. One is the GP After Hours service being cut. Secondly is we’ve lost our classification as an area of GP shortage which means that there aren’t any incentives that there were previously for doctors to come up and work in our area. So I know heaps of communities where every GP surgery the books are closed. They can’t take on new patients. So that’s the second whammy, and the third whammy is this Government has cut the bulk-billing incentive, the payment doctors get for bulk-billing. So I’ve seen surgeries, doctors have told me they’ve gone from bulk-billing 80 per cent of their patients to only bulk billing 20 per cent of their patients because of those cuts.
So Labor, we are looking at how we can fix those other two issues, but it’s a disgrace. It undermines Medicare if you can’t get in to see a doctor, and if you’re lucky enough after a long wait to see a doctor, you have to pay a huge amount of out-of-pocket costs. So we’re looking at this because this really is what Medicare is all about. Medicare is about being able to see a GP when you need to at an affordable price, and this Government is just taking a sledgehammer to this scheme.
COCHRANE: This morning I have with me the Federal Member for Shortland, Pat Conroy. Pat, I need to ask you, is it a reality that we may well see a National Anti-Corruption Commission established?
CONROY: Well that’s Labor’s policy. Since 2015, we’ve had a very strong policy of a National Anti-Corruption Commission. It is really, I think, probably the number one issue people pull me up about after health, is they want integrity in federal politics. And for some reason this Government keeps refusing to do it. I don’t know whether it’s because of all of the scandals they’ve had or whether they’re worried about what it will unearth, but we’ve had a policy for the last seven years of a National Anti-Corruption Commission. If we are elected it will be one of our first acts to enter Parliament, and it’s really important. People need to have confidence in politicians. The only profession that I think has less trust than politicians is used car salespeople - apologies out there to any used car salespeople listening – but politics is held in very low regard by the community, and we need to restore trust in democracy. And one of the best ways of doing that is by establishing a National Anti-Corruption Commission.
COCHRANE: Pat, tell me is this area of Newcastle and the Hunter Valley important to the leader Anthony Albanese? Will we see him up here more leading up to the next election?
CONROY: Oh absolutely, and it was important symbolism that Albo gave his first major speech of the election campaign – because that’s what we are in – in Newcastle. That signals how important he regards this region. And he is no stranger to this region. He’s been working to improve the outcomes of this area for 20 or 30 years. It was he as Infrastructure Minister that drove the fabulous Hunter Expressway being built, so he knows how important this community is. When we announced our energy policy and our policy of bringing back manufacturing, our National Rail Plan which he also talked about yesterday, he made the point that not only will we be building railway lines like high speed rail in this country, the trains that will be running on them will be built in Australia. So I want EDI Downer at Cardiff to be building trains again, not just repairing substandard trains brought in from China.
COCHRANE: We would love to see that because that’s the concern, and that was mentioned yesterday in the talkback calls we received here – we’ve got these trains that come through, there’s cracked interior in them, there’s problems with them on the track, there’s problems with them because they are inferior as you said. They’re made overseas, why can’t we have them made in Australia?
CONROY: It is just silly, and like, Gladys Berejiklian once bragged that Australian workers are no good at building trains. Well it’s rubbish. You just look at the trains that her Government bought, the trams, the light rail they bought from Spain that are cracked. When I talk to workers at EDI Downer, the stories they tell me, they’re just horror stories about the work they are having to do to repair them. And in the long run, it is cheaper to build them in Australia because not only do you actually get the quality build, you get those workers employed, they pay taxes which goes back into the economy, they buy things from the local shops, so we’ve got a firm made in Australia plan and at the heart of that is a National Rail Manufacturing strategy to really drive that process and work with the States to make that happen.
COCHRANE: Pat, I have a news commitment that I have to go to, but I want to thank you for giving us your reflections of the meeting yesterday. It means a lot to us that you were able to tell us what was said and what was presented by the Opposition Leader, Anthony Albanese. We look forward to hearing more from you. There’s other people we’d like to hear from. I’d like to hear from the seat of Paterson, there’s some concerns there, we hope he comes and visits with Meryl Swanson in that seat, and also for the seat of Hunter where Joel Fitzgibbon is vacating, we’d like to hear about that in the future.
CONROY: Absolutely, and Dan Repacholi, our candidate for Hunter is a great guy, and I am sure he would be keen to talk to you guys whenever he can.
COCHRANE: Thank you so much for this morning Pat.
CONROY: Have a great morning.