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Community health centres are a cherished innovation from the Whitlam era – yet they are at risk of collapse unless today’s Labor governments throw a lifeline. By Royce Millar.
Community healthcare centres under threat
Caroline Hogg could barely believe what she was hearing. As she had done for 55 years, the former Labor Victorian health minister had called in mid-October to book a doctor’s appointment at the Collingwood community health centre in Melbourne’s inner north, only to be told there would be no more GP consultations.
That same day, the centre’s manager, cohealth, had announced that on December 19, a week before Christmas, it would cease GP and counselling services at clinics in Collingwood, Fitzroy and Kensington – axing affordable, wraparound healthcare to 12,500 vulnerable Melburnians, local residents and workers.
The decision came as a shock to staff and to patients who fear for a future in a wider health system already under strain and not geared for those with complex needs. Health professionals say the closures are an alarm bell for community health nationwide. On Thursday The Age reported that another wraparound healthcare provider, Better Health Network (BHN), planned to shut two of its sites in Melbourne’s south-east, although those centres do not provide GP services.
Cohealth is one of Australia’s largest community health providers – the result of a merger in 2014 of services across Victoria. The non-profit now owns 21 clinics across that state and in Tasmania.
Hogg, a Cain–Kirner government minister from the 1980s on, was a young local councillor when the Collingwood centre opened in the 1970s as part of the community health push across Australia’s poorest neighbourhoods. Its antecedent, Singleton’s in Wellington Street, was established in 1869 by a devout evangelical couple who sought to provide free healthcare but also bring temperance to a pub-going, battler community.
Today, the clinic provides a wide range of services under one leaking roof, including GPs, counselling, physiotherapy, podiatry, pathology, speech therapy and a needle and syringe program.
Cohealth plans to close the crumbling Collingwood centre altogether mid next year and sell the site, which was bought with funds from the Whitlam government. The announcement comes under Labor governments at federal and state levels, and just days before the 50th anniversary of Whitlam’s dismissal.
The news left Hogg in tears. “The care was always wonderful, thorough, thoughtful and non-judgemental,” she says. “It was a joy to visit the place.”
The closure is an affront to what she calls the “Collingwood ethos”. Surrounded by working-class landmarks such as John Wren’s infamous illegal “tote” shopfront, the Collingwood Town Hall, the Magpies’ former home ground, Victoria Park, and the Hoddle Street public housing high rise, the health centre is at the very heart of old Labor heartland.
“This seems a particularly corporate way to go about things,” says Hogg. “Thoughtless and cruel.”
Old inner Melbourne Labor diehards are fired up, accusing cohealth of betraying their trailblazing vision.
Community health was always meant to cater for all locals. This reporter has attended the Collingwood centre for many years. It is especially important for those doing it tough: public tenants, refugees, the homeless, people with disability or with mental health or drug-related issues.
Aisha Darawish is a public housing tenant who formerly lived at the Collingwood high-rise flats and is now based in Carlton. Born in Ethiopia, the mother of three says the news of the closure was one of the most painful things she’s experienced. “I’ve never felt hurt like it,” she says.
Aisha explains how in 2012 doctors, nurses, midwives and counsellors helped her through a traumatic pregnancy and a long postnatal depression – a kind of care she doubts she will find elsewhere. “Cohealth to me is like family.”
Cohealth says the closure of GP services is due to a worsening funding shortfall, decades of underinvestment, ageing infrastructure and a Medicare model that doesn’t match the complex care the clinics provide.
The clinics at Collingwood, Kensington and Fitzroy employ 29 GPs; most will likely be made redundant. Cohealth board chair Kerry Thompson tells The Saturday Paper her organisation has worked for years to find a “sustainable future” for its GPs. In September it wrote to both state and federal health ministers seeking urgent support, to no avail.
She says cohealth has also repeatedly sought state assistance to upgrade the Collingwood centre, including a failed 2019 request for help with a redevelopment plan for a ground-floor clinic with community housing above.
At the federal level, Medicare rebates barely cover doctors’ salaries, leaving a growing shortage of funds for nurses, receptionists and other operating costs. Cohealth lost more than $13 million through 2022/23 and 2023/24.
Compared with private GPs, cohealth doctors tend to spend more time with patients, while Medicare rebates are structured around shorter appointments – paying more for practices that squeeze in more, shorter, consultations.
Dr Cath Keaney works at Collingwood one day a week and in private practice other days. “I can tell you firsthand it [Medicare] is not fit for purpose for community health,” she told a packed protest meeting at Fitzroy Town Hall last Friday. “This is because clinical services at cohealth are exceptional.”
Valued cohealth services are “invisible” to Medicare, she said, listing top-class nursing, immunisation, wound management and a caring pharmacy that “provides safe and considered dispensing rather than being a primarily retail outlet”.
Health professionals also fear the closures’ knock-on effects, including inundation of already-stretched inner-city hospitals such as St Vincent’s. Cohealth says it is trying to find alternative GP clinics for its patients, but many are already at capacity.
Fitzroy psychiatrist Brian Stagoll was a president of the Collingwood and Fitzroy health centres years before cohealth took over management just over a decade ago. The Labor life member slams cohealth’s decision as an “act of bureaucratic bastardry”.
Closing the three services will cost the health system far more than it saves, he says. “[Patients] will have two choices: they can either go without primary or preventative healthcare, then flood the emergency departments of public hospitals when their condition becomes critical, or they can die.”
Stagoll is passionate about the legacy and the crucial role of community health in keeping communities “afloat”. He concedes cohealth’s funding challenges, but asks “since when is that an excuse to abandon the health needs of 12,500 vulnerable people?”
He despairs that big health providers have lost touch with the communities they are supposed to serve and says the three centres are not cohealth’s to close or sell.
Kerry Thompson says cohealth has a community advisory committee that helps with the organisation’s planning. Its membership has not been made public.
The Greens say blaming cohealth deflects heat from Labor and its failure to properly support healthcare to those most in need. MP for Richmond Gabrielle de Vietri told the Fitzroy public meeting cohealth had been “sounding the alarm” for years.
“We must be pointing firmly at the state and federal Labor governments, because it is their responsibility to fund our community health sector,” she said.
Even for Labor governments long swept up by neoliberalism, the dismantling of such cherished health services looks a stretch.
Community attachment to the centres is deep across inner Melbourne. With just a few days’ notice, protest meetings in Fitzroy and Kensington were packed and overflowing last week. Federal MPs were present at both – they felt they had to be.
In its landslide federal election win this year, Labor reclaimed the seat of Melbourne from the Greens. But the seat is now marginal and a state poll looms next year. Labor will also be hoping to win back Richmond – which takes in the Collingwood and Fitzroy clinics – which it held forever before the Greens took it in 2022.
Labor’s sensitivity to the closures was evident in the Victorian parliament this week. It allowed a Greens motion to pass calling for state commitment to a $4 million rescue package, $25 million at least to upgrade the Collingwood centre and a deal with Canberra for a long-term community health funding model. The opposition backed the motion.
Labor powerbrokers are pushing hard for a rescue package. The Albanese government has described the closures as “deeply disappointing” and urged cohealth to reconsider.
Though the federal government says community health will benefit from reforms to incentivise bulk-billing payments, due to kick in this month, cohealth says Medicare rebates won’t cover the cost of the care it provides.
In response to questions, the Allan government points to $188 million last year spent on community care across the state, and the $68.3 million allocated to cohealth in this year’s state budget. A state spokesperson stresses the Commonwealth is responsible for Medicare and primary-care funding and notes that Victorian Minister for Health Mary-Anne Thomas has written to her federal counterpart seeking an “urgent solution”.
A Commonwealth spokesperson says discussions with cohealth and the Allan state government about “possible solutions” are ongoing. A meeting is scheduled for next week.
Former state MP and community health centre user Caroline Hogg says of the Collingwood clinic: “It’s almost impossible to overstate its importance. What it has saved governments, and in the way it’s been embraced by the community.”
Let’s see, in the weeks before Christmas, how much the Collingwood ethos still matters.
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on November 1, 2025 as "Royce Millar".
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