One rule runs through all of these. Our target is government policy, never individual international doctors. They are valued colleagues. They always will be part of our workforce.
Isn't this anti-international-doctor, even xenophobic?
No. And we say so first. International doctors are valued colleagues who keep our hospitals running. They always will be part of the workforce. Our argument is with government policy, not with people.
The problem is a system that recruits from overseas past a queue of its own graduates, instead of fixing the bottleneck that created it. Under the reform we support, every doctor already practising here keeps everything they have. New arrivals earn priority through five years of Australian service. We want both: fair treatment for the doctors already here, and a path through for the ones we trained.
Hospitals and rural communities rely on IMGs. Won't this hurt patients?
Patient care is exactly why we're doing this. Prioritisation has to be sequenced with expanding accredited training and public specialist jobs. That grows the pipeline rather than pulling staff off wards.
The UK kept applications open to everyone. It simply directed overseas recruitment toward genuine areas of need. No one is left unstaffed. The workforce is just built more sustainably. There's an ethical point too: over-relying on overseas recruitment drains lower-income countries of the doctors they trained.
The government's report says the workforce is "balanced" - so what's the problem?
Read the fine print. "Balanced" counts total bodies. It hides a structural break. The same report shows a junior-doctor pool that more than doubles while training places barely move, and a deepening specialist shortage toward 2048.
"Demand" in the model means how much care people currently use, not how much they need. It can't see the patient who never gets an appointment. A balanced headline over a broken pipeline is exactly the problem. The clearest single sign: progression into specialty training has collapsed from 52% to 33% a year.
Aren't you just protecting your own future jobs? Isn't this self-interested?
We have skin in the game. We're upfront about that. But this is public-interest advocacy. Taxpayers spend over a decade and serious money training each doctor. Right now that investment is being wasted while communities still can't get a specialist.
Fixing the pipeline serves patients first. We just happen to be the ones who can see it clearly from the inside.
Isn't the training bottleneck the colleges' fault, not the government's?
It's a shared system. We're not interested in blame. We're interested in the fix. Government holds the real levers. It funds the Specialist Training Program. It sets training-place and graduate numbers.
It can act now, including by making training funding conditional on prioritising domestic graduates. Everyone has a role. Government has the biggest one.
Why not just train more doctors or open more medical schools?
Because more graduates into a blocked pipeline makes the bottleneck worse, not better. The report itself says workforce growth alone won't solve it.
The fix is at the exit, not the entrance: more specialist training places, more public consultant jobs, and priority for the graduates we already have. Widening the front door while the back door is bricked up helps no one.
Is there any evidence prioritisation actually works?
Yes. And it's recent. In the first recruitment round under the United Kingdom's 2026 prioritisation law, competition ratios halved. 98% of training posts went to prioritised doctors. Every GP training place was filled by a UK graduate or an existing NHS doctor. Applications stayed open to everyone.
We're honest that this is early data from one cycle, not a settled long-term outcome. But it is a real, working precedent. Our modelling, built on Australia's own figures, projects the same effect here.
Does the modelling hold up?
It's built on the Commonwealth's own numbers. The model runs the June 2026 Whole of Medical Workforce Compendium figures forward, with the international-graduate share anchored to Medical Deans and AHPRA data.
It is deliberately illustrative. It shows the direction and plausible magnitude of effect under stated, adjustable assumptions, not a precise forecast. You can move the levers yourself on the Explore the model page. The full methodology is published on the Read the paper page.
What exactly are you asking for?
Five things:
1. Fix the bottleneck by expanding accredited specialty training places (around 1,150 more a year). 2. Legislate an Australian domestic-graduate prioritisation framework, as the UK did in 2026, on the basis of where a doctor trained and never their nationality, with everyone already practising here fully protected. 3. Direct overseas recruitment to areas that genuinely need it. 4. Pause new medical school places until training capacity catches up. 5. Bring back independent national medical workforce planning, so this never happens again.