AMA: Hospital system overrun by mass immigration

Advertisement

Australian Medical Association (AMA) Victorian president, Roderick McRae, was quoted extensively over the weekend in The Age (here and here) warning that Victoria’s hospitals were already overrun pre-COVID, suffering from a decade of extreme population growth and a lack of funding. This, in turn, has left the health system in a precarious position to cope with COVID outbreaks:

Australian Medical Association state president Dr Roderick McRae says Victoria’s healthcare system had been in “dire straits” long before the pandemic hit.

Hospitals have been underfunded for years, he says, leading to bed and staffing shortages…

Victoria now has more patients than ever before and they are sicker…

McRae says: “We’ve seen the population [growth] in Melbourne double in the last 10 to 12 years and the bed numbers and hospital services just haven’t kept up. The pandemic has just further exposed every hole that was already there”…

“In a way we’ve got away with it, but COVID has ripped all of the clothes off, so it is standing there naked … it’s extremely likely we will fall short of what we wished we’d been able to provide.”

Dr Simon Judkins – a former president of the Australasian College of Emergency Medicine – also believes Melbourne’s hospital system is at breaking point:

Judkins… wonders how much more the system can take.

He recalls a time early last year when he heard Australia’s then chief medical officer, Brendan Murphy, telling reporters that to manage the pandemic hospitals would need to open their “surge capacity”.

“I remember saying at the time ‘what surge capacity?’ because hospitals across Victoria were already running at full capacity,” he says.

Ask any doctor working in a Victorian hospital about the past 18 months, he says, and they will tell of patients who have become seriously unwell while waiting too long for care…

“I have no doubt that when we look back on this there will be a significant number of what we would consider to be preventable deaths.”

Advertisement

Why aren’t the costs of extreme immigration ever factored in by the population boosters? It’s not like they aren’t known?

Infrastructure Australia’s modelling for Melbourne shows that the percentage of the population that will have access to hospitals (let alone schools, jobs and green space) will worsen as the city’s population soars to a projected 7.3 million people by 2046 under the mass immigration ‘Big Australia’ policy:

Infrastructure Australia Melbourne projections

Immigration-driven population growth will further destroy Melbourne’s livability.

Advertisement

It is exactly the same story for Sydney as its population swells to a projected 7.4 million by 2046:

Infrastructure Australia projections

Sydney living standards to deteriorate as population swells.

Yet, the Intergenerational Report projected that mass immigration will be promptly rebooted post COVID, and that this will become permanent policy for Australia:

Advertisement
Net overseas migration

Back to ‘Big Australia’ immigration.

Heaven help us when the next pandemic arrives.

About the author
Leith van Onselen is Chief Economist at the MB Fund and MB Super. He is also a co-founder of MacroBusiness. Leith has previously worked at the Australian Treasury, Victorian Treasury and Goldman Sachs.