Remember when: Gold Coast and Tweed doctors demanded tourists be counted for health funding

SOUTHERN tourists were blamed for a critical shortage of medical services in the Tweed Shire.

Gold Coast History: Gold Coast Bulletin 1991, December 3. Front page.

Gold Coast Bulletin, Tuesday December 3, 1991

SOUTHERN tourists were blamed for a critical shortage of medical services in the Tweed Shire.

Gold Coast History: Gold Coast Bulletin 1991, December 3. Front page.

The accusations came from a three-man Federal Government medical task force which toured the Tweed hospital to talk to executives.

And Gold Coast doctors, when asked if there were similar problems north of the border, called for governments to take into account the region’s huge tourist population when allocating funds to public health services.

A spokesman for the Gold Coast Medical Association said it was not general practitioners who bore the brunt of the influx of tourists rather that services in public and private hospitals were put under strain.

He said doctors had been campaigning for years to have the Gold Coast’s tourist population taken into account when reviewing funding levels.

“The government has never taken into account the tourist population when allocating funding to the Gold Coast,” he said.

The spokesman said the government had long ignored the tourist population, which swelled to more than 500,000 each Christmas.

Meanwhile, a Gold Coast high school student at the centre of a child pornography ring investigation resigned “in the best interests of the school”.

The acting headmaster of the school sought the then-42-year-old’s resignation after learning police had raided the man’s high-rise unit the previous month and found large quantities of child pornography.

Police had not laid charges against the man at the time the Bulletin went to print.