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28-04-2025
CANBERRA/ SYDNEY: From an office perched on the scalloped edge of the continent, Victoria Bradley jokes that she has the most beautiful doctor’s practice in Australia.
Outside her window, farmland rolls into rocky coastline, hemming a glasslike bay striped with turquoise and populated by showboating dolphins.
H
ome to about 3,000 people, a few shops, two roundabouts and a tiny hospital, Streaky Bay is an idyllic beach town.
For Dr Bradley, though, it is anything but the area’s sole, permanent doctor, she spent years essentially on call 24/7.
Running the hospital and the general practitioner (GP) clinic, life was a never-ending game of catch up. She’d do rounds at the wards before, after and in between regular appointments. Even on good days, lunch breaks were often a pipe dream. On bad days, a hospital emergency would blow up her already punishing schedule.
Burnt out, two years ago she quit and the thread holding together the remnants of the town’s healthcare system snapped.
Streaky Bay is at the forefront of a national crisis: inadequate government funding is exacerbating a shortage of critical healthcare workers like Dr Bradley; wait times are ballooning; doctors are beginning to write their own rules on fees, and costs to patients are skyrocketing.
A once-revered universal healthcare system is crumbling at every level, sometimes barely getting by on the sheer willpower of doctors and local communities.
As a result, more and more Australians, regardless of where they live, are delaying or going without the care they need.
Health has become a defining issue for voters ahead of the nation’s election on 3 May, with both of Australia’s major parties promising billions of dollars in additional funding but experts say the solutions being offered up are Band-Aid fixes, while what is needed are sweeping changes to the way the system is funded reform for which there has so far been a lack of political will.
Australians tell media the country is at a crossroads, and needs to decide if universal healthcare is worth saving.
Healthcare was the last thing on Renee Elliott’s mind when she moved to Streaky Bay, until the 40-year-old found a cancerous lump in her breast in 2019 and another one four years later. Seeing a local GP was the least of her problems. With the expertise and treatment she needed only available in Adelaide, about 500km away, Elliott has spent hundreds of hours and tens of thousands of dollars accessing life-saving care, all while raising three boys and running a business.
Though she has since clawed back a chunk of the cost through government schemes, it made an already harrowing time that much more draining: financially, emotionally and physically.
“You’re trying to get better… but having to juggle all that as well. It was very tricky.”
When Australia’s modern health system was born four decades ago, underpinned by a public insurance scheme called Medicare, it was supposed to guarantee affordable and accessible high-quality care to people like Elliott as “a basic right”.
Health funding here is complex and shared between states and federal governments but the scheme essentially meant Australians could present their bright green Medicare member card at a doctor’s office or hospital, and Canberra would be sent a bill. It paid through rebates funded by taxes. Patients would either receive “bulk billed” completely free care, mostly through the emerging public system, or heavily subsidized treatment through a private healthcare sector offering more benefits and choice to those who wanted them. (Int’l Monitoring Desk)
