Dear Ministers,
We are the future medical workforce you are training. You will find us this week on placement in the hospitals you run: at 7am handover, in theatre holding retractors, in emergency departments, sitting with patients and families on the worst days of their lives. For many of us it has been six or more years to get to this point, sacrificing the best of our early adulthood in a bid to enter a career that lets us serve our communities. We are watching what is happening to those junior doctors just ahead of us, who are teaching us how to care for this country.
They are also showing us what happens next.
The doctors two, five, eight years ahead of us are stuck. In 2018, more than half of them stepped into specialty training each year. Today it is one in three. On your own department's projections, published in June 2026, it will fall to 15 in every 100, and the queue of doctors waiting will more than double, to 38,222. Many will wait until their eighth postgraduate year for a training place that once began in their second. They keep your hospitals running in 'unaccredited' jobs that count for nothing toward their careers, where they reapply every year and are told to be patient. Meanwhile, patients wait longer and longer for specialists your same report says are already in shortage.
And while our colleagues queue, the gate opens elsewhere. Every year more doctors arrive from overseas than we graduate at home. Your own modelling shows that 64 per cent of all growth in registrar positions will be filled by international medical graduates.
Let us be clear, because it matters to us: this is not about international doctors. They are our teachers, our colleagues and our friends, and rural Australia depends on them. Under the reform we support, every doctor already practising in Australia keeps everything they have, and new arrivals earn priority through five years of Australian service. This is about a government recruiting past a queue of its own making, a queue of doctors the public paid up to $2.6 million each to train.
The United Kingdom faced the same failure. In March 2026 it legislated to prioritise its own graduates while keeping applications open to all, and in one recruitment round competition ratios halved and 98 per cent of posts went to prioritised doctors. Modelling built on your own projections shows the same reform clears Australia's backlog by 2029, with doctors beginning specialty training in their second or third year instead of their eighth.
So we ask you, together, to:
- Prioritise the doctors Australia trains, in law, on the basis of where a doctor trained and never their nationality, with everyone already practising here fully protected;
- Fund at least around 1,150 more accredited specialty training places every year, so more of us can train, sooner;
- Direct overseas recruitment to the rural and regional communities that genuinely need it;
- Pause new medical school places until training capacity catches up with the graduates you already have; and
- Bring back independent national medical workforce planning, so this never happens again.
We did not write this letter because we want to leave. Too many of us are already planning to: interstate, overseas, or out of medicine altogether. Every one of those departures is a doctor you have already paid for, walking away from the patients who are waiting for them.
Train us. We're right here.