1. Expand healthcare resources
The government’s own report estimates that Australia is short about 2,460 full-time equivalent GPs, and the shortage will rise to 5,560 by 2033. Due to decades of ideologically driven under-resourcing, profiteering, and outsourcing to management consultants, Australia’s public healthcare system was overwhelmed even before the COVID-19 pandemic, but instead of recognising the pandemic as a wake-up call to permanently expand healthcare resources, to both meet the public health challenge and establish a much higher standard of healthcare delivery for all Australians into the future, both Federal and State governments have overseen woefully inadequate responses.
Australia must fund more medical school and nursing school places to train more doctors and nurses. Mobilise a dramatic increase in clinical staff (paramedics, nurses and doctors), equipment and technology, and beds and hospitals, to address the crisis besetting every aspect of the public healthcare system — ambulance services, public hospitals, regional health care, mental health, disability services, and aged care.
2. Royal Commission into COVID-19 response
Without prejudice to the outcome, the ACP supports a Royal Commission into all aspects of the COVID-19 response, to learn lessons from the experience that can be applied to any future events. The Royal Commission should have multiple commissioners, be open-ended timewise, hold all hearings in public, and not limit its enquiries in any area related to the public health and political response to COVID-19. Only if there is full transparency around consequential events such as COVID-19 will the public trust their governing officials.
