The Federal Government is set to welcome offshore-trained GPs to Australia from Monday next week – raising concerns from the peak group for GPs and raising eyebrows among those seeking policy consistency for the nation’s future workforce.
While the Opposition leader has likened international students to ‘Boat arrivals’ and the Federal Government have kicked off their pre-election campaign running hard on the virtues of international student caps, the nation’s Health Ministers have given the green light to doctors from overseas, trained in Ireland, New Zealand or the UK.
The Health Ministers have agreed that GPs trained in the three offshore locations will be able to bypass testing by the Royal Australian College of GPs and instead be registered by Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency (AHPRA).
The irony of filling Australian job vacancies with offshore graduates while preventing more from studying in Australia doesn’t yet appear to have registered in the national consciousness. It could be construed as a significant shift from a ‘grow your own’ workforce approach, where a proportion of international students are allowed to remain on our shores to ply their trade according to workforce need; to a skills import model, where local training programs remain tightly controlled in a range of professions, forcing skills gaps to be plugged by people trained offshore.
The RACGPs was not happy, saying that health ministers would figuratively have blood on their hands if any blunders were committed by the offshore-trained medicos, saying that the AHPRA was not ready or suitable to assess doctors trained offshore.
Whether the decision to allow more offshore graduates into Australia changes rhetoric about boat arrivals and rent raisers remains to be seen, but the move is also interesting for policy watchers. It is an early shot across the bows of professional peak bodies, which have tightly controlled university curricula and in some cases intake numbers for domestic students enrolling in professional courses
