← all questions · GP and rural generalism · General practice and rural generalism guide
It isn't any more. A record 1,772 doctors started AGPT in 2026, up 19%, with another 1,110 eligible applicants missing out 5; every 2027 place went in the main round and the second intake was cancelled 1. The old reputation came from hospital-only exposure and from Medicare rebates being mistaken for GP income.
The premise expired. A record 1,772 doctors commenced RACGP AGPT in 2026, up 19% on 2025's 1,507, and a further 1,110 eligible doctors applied and did not get a place 5. For 2027 the colleges were funded for up to 1,694 RACGP and 374 ACRRM places — about 2,068, a record — and the RACGP still allocated every one of them in the main round and cancelled the second intake 21. Commonwealth funding adds 300 places in 2027 and 400 from 2028 3.
Why the reputation stuck. Three explanations recur and none of them is about the work. First, exposure: you spend medical school and your prevocational years inside hospitals, where the only GP you see is the one being blamed on a discharge summary. Second, money read wrongly — the Medicare rebate is the patient's subsidy, not the doctor's salary, and a GP who charges a gap earns fine. Third, prestige, which is a hospital culture problem, not a job description 6.
The honest counter-argument, which the sub also publishes. GP income at the top end requires throughput: 24–32 patients a day to make what a psychiatrist makes off eight. Registrar pay is a genuine trough — NTCER minimums for 2025–26 are $94,018 at GPT1 rising to $116,623 at GPT3/4, and you get the higher of the base rate or 44.79% of gross billings, never both 4. A $30,000 incentive, paid over six months from your first community GP term on a Commonwealth-funded pathway, has been running since semester 1 2026 3.
What actually changed. Hospital training got harder and its end point got worse — fractional consultant jobs, or none — while GP kept autonomy, geography and an earlier finish 7. That is the argument people now make out loud, and the counter-argument from a GPT3 who passed all three exams and applied back to hospital sits right beside it.
r/ausjdocs — community view, not policy; verbatim, cautionary beside positive where both exist, every quote linked to the comment.
But you still have to see 24-32 patients a day to earn less than a psychiatrist can with 8 patients a day, or dermatologist with 16 patients.
Ignorance. It's a great career. The pay is an issue until you realise Medicare rebates are the patients insurance and not your salary.
Medical students are mostly based in a hospital environment. Apart from that one GP term in med school, that is pretty much all they will get and then they'll start their formative training in yet a hospital environment again. So exposure/ignorance is one part of the equation.
I fell for the claims of GP = work life balance and cruisy patient conditions.
And yet people look at you like you have two heads when you tell them hospital training nowadays is a dead end.
Asked 25 times on r/ausjdocs (title-regex count) · encoded by hand from the numbered sources, retrieved 12 Sept 2026; no AI wrote any of it. how the count was made
asked_count = posts in r_ausjdocs_posts.jsonl (19,145 posts, 2022-09-13 to 2026-09-12) whose title matches /\bGP\b.{0,55}(unpopular|disrespect|looked down|stigma|why (not|don|is no)|hate|bash|shortage|crisis|dying)|(unpopular|stigma|disrespect|looked down|shortage).{0,40}(\bGP\b|general pract)/i. Quotes are the highest-scoring answers in the 2024 'why is GP unpopular' thread and the 2026 'why did GP become competitive' thread, with the GPT3 who went back to hospital included so the lifestyle pitch has its rebuttal attached.