A Hunter council has called on the NSW government to scrap its gun buyback scheme and funnel the money into regional health services and roads instead.
Upper Hunter Shire mayor Maurice Collison made the case during the shire's council meeting on Monday night as the shire braced itself for the possible loss of maternity care at Scone's Scott Memorial Hospital.
The call was one of five parts of a mayoral minute moved by Cr Collison and carried unanimously.
"How can there be funding for gun buybacks yet no proper funding for roads and health services? People are dying on our roads and they are dying in our health system yet these are not priorities of our government," the mayor said.
He described the buyback as "a program so flawed and rushed and so obviously structured as a political stunt it's been shunned by the majority of the population".
The motion was prompted chiefly by the looming retirement of the last obstetrician at Scott Memorial Hospital, a development the council warned could force expectant mothers across the Upper Hunter to travel to Maitland for antenatal, birthing and postnatal care.
The council resolved to write to the NSW Minister for Regional Health, Ryan Park, seeking urgent help with regional health service issues, including specialist and surgical access and the future of maternity services at Scone.
It will also lobby for the retention of obstetric services at the hospital and continue working with the Hunter Joint Organisation and Hunter New England Health on the issue.
Cr Collison told the chamber he had raised the issue with the Hunter Joint Organisation board a fortnight earlier and had been invited by the Member for Upper Hunter, Dave Layzell, to a roundtable with Hunter New England Health on September 7.
He said he had put the motion forward partly because of his own experience with a postponed surgical procedure, after which he discovered other Upper Hunter residents had faced the same problem.
Several councillors backed the motion, describing the state of regional health services as untenable for a shire trying to attract young families.
Cr Troy Stolz said it was simply not good enough in 2026 for mothers to be having babies by the side of the road.
"We want to encourage the growth of the shire," he said.
"We want young families to be raised in this shire.
"We need to have this very important piece of infrastructure in the shire to entice people to make that green change."
He described the lack of availability of services in the Upper Hunter as "discrimination by postcode".
He noted Muswellbrook lost its maternity ward in March 2022 and warned that losing Scone's service too would leave two adjoining shires of about 30,000 people without any local maternity care, forcing a drive to Tamworth or Maitland.
"There's enough stress on our healthcare system without adding more to those areas with the influx of people from our shire travelling," he said.
"It just ridiculous. This government's intent on wasting money on ridiculous things like gun buybacks."
Councillors also raised the absence of a CT scanner and oncology services in Scone.
Cr Stolz, who is undergoing treatment for cancer, said oncology was still missing from Scone with several residents in Merriwa travelling to Maitland for chemotherapy.
"It's not much fun after spending 4.5 hours in a chemo chair."
Cr Allison McPhee recounted the case of an elderly Scone woman who was treated by a telehealth doctor overnight, then had to be taken to Maitland by ambulance for a CT scan, still in her nightwear, before being discharged, but with no way home.
"It's absolutely incomprehensible that in 2026, this is the level of service that you are expected to tolerate in regional NSW," she said.
Cr George Fraser argued the obstetrician shortage reflected a broader, systemic difficulty with attracting and retaining doctors to rural areas, rather than a problem specific to the Scone practice, and said regional councils generally needed to keep pressing state and federal governments on health access.
He said he had reservations about the fourth point of the motion relating to gun buyback funding, calling it "a little on the political side", while still supporting the motion overall.
