Last month, Mr Gee updated Parliament on the proposed Murray Darling Medical School, expressing his disappointment that city-based universities had taken an “unnecessarily predatory and negative approach … on this issue”, and were trying to “kill the Charles Sturt University proposal”.

“Less than 10 per cent of medical students trained at the big city universities go on to practice medicine in the country,” Mr Gee told Parliament. “The universities running the current system are failing country Australia.”

Head of the School of Rural Health, Associate Professor Mark Arnold, said he couldn’t explain what had prompted Mr Gee’s comments, which he said were an inaccurate reflection of the school’s work in the Central West.

From 2004 to the end of 2017, more than 800 medical students would have graduated from the School of Rural Health after doing “extended medical placements”, he said.

“We’ve been a net employer in the region.

“The description of our activities I don’t think is accurate, in the sense that we’ve not taken something out of the area as distinct to to putting back into the area.”

Dr Arnold, who is also a rheumatologist working in Dubbo, Orange and Gloucester, said better post-graduate pathways, and not more medical students, were the key to solving Australia’s rural doctor shortage.

“The federal government’s move to establish independent Rural Training Hubs and other pathways are very welcome, it’s just that that is only really the first step in establishing a training pathway to allow students to convert their intention into reality,” Dr Arnold said.

“Once a medical student graduates they have to do a year of supervised practice in hospital and they enter into a vocational training program to become a specialist GP or other specialist in year three.

“There needs to be a programmatic change so students can be trained to become doctors capable of independent practice.”

On Monday Mr Gee said he stood by all of his comments regarding the University of Sydney, and other big medical schools.

“The cold hard truth is training overseas students in Australia is a nice little earner for them and they want to keep the closed shop closed,” Mr Gee said in a statement.

“The current system has been excellent at training doctors for practice in the city, but has been an abject failure for training doctors in the bush.

“The big universities have been at it for years, but the lack of results speak for themselves. It’s time to try something new.”