Rural and regional Australians have listened to yet another Budget speech that has not delivered a rural medical school to serve the needs of the 2 million people living in the Murray Darling Basin.

Despite more than 50 000 people signing up to support the establishment of a new rurally based medical school across two States, the government has declined to include funding in the 2014-15 Budget.

Charles Sturt University (CSU) Vice-Chancellor Professor Andrew Vann said rural people have access to half the doctors compared to major cities, and many are incurring significant additional costs to travel vast distances to see a GP.

"Following the Budget speech, rural people will have to pay more for their fuel, pay more to see a GP, but will have no better access to doctors compared to major cities than we had 20 years ago," he said. 

"A lot of rural and Indigenous people just don't go to the doctor when they need to, contributing to substantially higher rates of chronic disease in rural areas and higher rates of unnecessary hospitalisations that are overstretching our rural hospitals.

"Despite hundreds of millions of dollars spent on rural medical workforce programs, rural Australians are now almost entirely reliant on recruiting GPs from overseas due to the continuing reluctance of Australian medical graduates to locate to rural practice.

"The proportion of medical students training in rural areas has grown significantly in the last decade, but the number of Australian medical graduates working in rural areas has not changed for more than 20 years.

"City medical students come to rural hospitals for great quality training and experience, but the evidence continues to show that they simply do not stay on to work in the numbers we need.

"We thank our local members who argued as strongly as they could for this initiative to be approved.

"This is a sound and well-targeted proposal, based on the evidence of the most successful approach to growing our domestic rural medical workforce and giving rural students a fair chance to study medicine. 

"We will not give up on this issue, and will continue to discuss the way forward with our communities."

Read more about the medical school proposal for inland Australia here.