THERE’S a saying in politics that your worst day in government is better than your best day in opposition and, by the time the next federal election is due, Anne Webster will have spent around a thousand days on the wrong side of that cold reality.
The Nationals’ Member for Mallee, however, says she’s determined to keep working for better outcomes for the people of her electorate, despite the hobbling effect of the Coalition’s heavy defeat at the hands of Anthony Albanese’s Labor last year.
Like all surviving MPs on the losing side, Dr Webster has won her own seat, but lost clout. The ministers and other decision makers in the government are no longer members of her team and they will rarely, if ever, share her idealogical viewpoints, nor her policy ideas. That’s not to say that all the doors are closed, but she will have to knock a lot louder.
Barely into her second term as an MP, however, she has at least been handed something weighty to knock with. Dr Webster was recently made the Opposition’s spokesperson for regional health, which teams her with health spokesperson Anne Ruston and makes her part of what oppositions invariably call a “shadow ministry”, a group of senior politicians with no actual ministerial power, but plenty of opportunity to be heard.
Regional health is an extremely important topic in Mildura and Mallee, so Dr Webster intends making the most of that opportunity.
“It almost gives me a greater capacity to be able to push for change and advocate for our smaller regions … I’ll be able to get involved at a deeper level and push for change,” Dr Webster told The Guardian when asked to outline her plans for 2023.
At the top of her list is aged care, which she says is becoming unviable in our area and “people don’t want to have to leave their town just because they’re getting older”.
Dr Webster concedes that problems in aged care existed during her term in government, too, but she says she was working on fixes then and that that she won’t stop just because the political game has changed.
“Now that new (Labor) policy setting have been put in place, the viability of regional aged care is seriously in question and that’s not ok,” she said.
“I’ve been working with aged care facilities across the electorate to look at how do we need to manage this differently, what kind of additional supports, what is the framework in which, economically, quality aged care can be delivered in smaller social settings, in smaller towns.”
Then there’s the seemingly endless shortage of general practitioners in Mallee. It’s an old problem that neither side of politics, at federal or state level, has looked like solving.
“GP access across the electorate is in a critical state, so the expectation is that I’ll come up with some miracle solution,” Dr Webster said.
“I’d like to think that’s possible, but I think it’s such a complex area that the miracle certainly won’t be just sitting with me,” she added, pointing out that really her job is to drive and encourage collaboration between all the peak health and community bodies involved, so that solutions can be reached.
The heavy challenge of getting anything done while out of government and in an adversarial political system is far from lost on the Mallee MP, who admits she’s still learning the ropes, gears and levers of parliamentary function.
She recalls, for instance, a meeting with new Health Minister Mark Butler, which had started badly because a Coalition senator had that morning had a crack at a government senator in the upper house. Neither Dr Webster nor the minister had had anything to do with that conflict but, in an us-and-them system, there was a brief stoush over it before “we shifted tracks to the very things we needed to talk about”.
She says politics can be “a bit weird” like that, but that “it’s managing the argy-bargy and the political wins that everyone’s constantly trying to get in order to try and make a straight path for change”.
“That’s why I stepped into this role, because I want change,” she said.
“People in Mallee deserve change. People in regional Australia deserve a lot more than they get.”
