Here's a recipe for a more equitable health care system in Australia

Fourth, research on equity has to date focused on use and too little on access. Research on Aboriginal health needs to support the call by Humphery "for a move beyond the project … seeing research … as a collective enterprise of the broad research community'. The recent initiative of the NHMRC Research Agenda Working Group to develop such a strategy is welcome.

Fifth, rural and remote health care services need to reflect better the preferences of rural and remote communities. Then there needs to be adequate funding to allow the pursuit of what 'claims', and relative strengths of claims, are seen as relevant to these areas.

The key consideration in each instance is to ask what Australians want in terms of general practice, Aboriginal health services, rural health services, etc. It is essential to get citizens to make informed, resource-constrained choices (thereby avoiding wish-listing). There is Australian evidence, tentative thus far, that this can be done. There is also wider and more substantial international evidence about the feasibility and potential usefulness of such an approach. Informed community preferences should be the driving force of policy for equity in Australian health care.

Acknowledgements
In preparing the original of this paper, I received excellent feedback from Ian Monday of the Productivity Commission. I also received assistance from Aboriginal colleagues. My thanks to them. It was unfortunate that no Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander people were invited to the Round Table.
I acknowledge the Health Department of Western Australia for part-funding my chair.