The clinic, Bega’s only remaining bulk-billing clinic, is housed in an older three-bedroom home, which has issues with asbestos in the building itself and additional asbestos found under the floor boards.”

“It’s supposed to be about Closing the Gap," he said.

“But the bureaucrats will end up continuing to cause thousands upon thousands of preventable Aboriginal deaths by denying us access to appropriate resources for our not-for-profit Aboriginal medical services and not the current band-aid and one-off approach.”

If these deaths were happening in mainstream Australia there would be coronial inquests happening on a daily basis, Mr Matcham said.

This is just another instance of incompetence and lack of common sense on the part of an unwieldy bureaucracy without the expertise to cope with Australia's most pressing health care problem.

Mr Matcham said that the Office for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Health, the government body responsible for Aboriginal health nationally, was full of bureaucrats who had very little experience in Aboriginal health and health policy generally.

“With the millions of tax payers money that has been wasted on unneeded and unnecessary consultancies we could simply employ more Aboriginal Health Workers, doctors and dentists, more nurses and more medical transport services for the whole Community.”

Member for Bega Andrew Constance has called for an immediate injection of funding and resources to the Katungal services to maintain and enhance Aboriginal health services in Bega and throughout the region.

“One of the greatest challenges we face throughout the Far South Coast is the lack of resourcing to address the health care needs of Aboriginal people.

“Organisations such as Katungal are vital in ‘closing the gap’, the gap being the marked and shameful differences between the health of the Aboriginal people and that of the rest of the community.