: Well, thank you all for having us here again today. It's so great to be back here at the Urgent Care Clinic here in Rockhampton with the Prime Minister and with Senator Green. You know, the Urgent Care Clinic here delivers such crucial services to Rockhampton and takes much needed pressure off of our emergency systems. It provides real access to healthcare for a lot of people and their families here in the regions, and provides that key cost of living relief so they can come here and they can see a doctor when they need to with only their Medicare card and not their credit card. But I will pass over to the Prime Minister to say a few words.
ANTHONY ALBANESE, PRIME MINISTER: Thanks very much, Emily, and it's great to be back here in Rocky with yourself and with Senator Nita Green, the Senator for North Queensland, essentially, and Central Queensland. It is fantastic to be here and great to be in yet another Urgent Care Clinic. During the last election campaign, we committed to having 50 Urgent Care Clinics. We have not only just met that, we have 87 Urgent Care Clinics operating today, and more than 1 million Australians have got care through those Urgent Care Clinics right around the country. One quarter of those have been children under the age of 15. So, here in this centre since it opened just a year ago, there's been 14,600 locals have gone through and got the care that they need when they need it, and all they've needed is their Medicare card, not their credit card - because it's free. This is about how we strengthen Medicare, how we also make sure that we take pressure off emergency departments of hospitals. And everyone I have spoken to, whether it is the doctors, the nurses, the health professionals, or, most importantly, the patients who've come through these Urgent Care Clinics - or the parents who've brought their young ones to Urgent Care Clinics - has been so pleased with how successful they have been. And today, we've been able to welcome five new doctors who are starting as practitioners here at this Urgent Care Clinic here in Rockhampton and it's a great thing. Happy to take a couple questions.
JOURNALIST: You've just been talking with some locals here at the clinic. What have they been telling you?
PRIME MINISTER: They've been telling me about how convenient it is for them to come, get the care that they need when they need it. And it's so important, if people have a sprain or they cut themselves, or their kids fall off the bike or the skateboard, or you have a sporting injury - coming here, and being able to get the support immediately is so important. And for the doctors as well, have spoken to me about the satisfaction that they've got by being able to engage in the range of care that they want to, to use the experience and the skills that they have. They're able to do it here at the Urgent Care Clinic, and able to do it in a way that they know is making an enormous difference to local communities, and particularly in our regions.
JOURNALIST: So we're officially in election year now, why Rocky? Why stop here?
PRIME MINISTER: Well, I think we've got a fantastic candidate in Emily Mawson here, but I'm someone who wants to represent the entire country, and so this is, I think, I've lost count of the number of times I've come here as Prime Minister or as Leader of the Labor Party over a long period of time. But certainly, I've been here on multiple occasions as Prime Minister. This is at least my fourth visit here, and it's important. Tomorrow we'll be talking as well about the Bruce Highway, the upgrades that we have. A $7.2 billion announcement today to assist with the Bruce Highway. And one of the things that we have done here is, of course, the Rocky Ring Road. That was underfunded when we came to Government. I did some of the planning work way back more than a decade ago as Infrastructure Minister, and it hadn't been progressed. The funding wasn't there. A hole hadn't been dug. We have, since we came to Office, made sure the additional funding was put in there, and it's now, of course, under construction. Thank you.
