Ms Roxon was launching Australia’s Health 2010 report which predicts more Australians than ever before will contract cancer this year, while another 43,700 patients will die from the disease in 2010.

Marianne Warren, a member of the working party that made the submission for the Border centre, said the report made it clear the incidence of cancer had risen by 4 per cent.

“There has been some improvements in mortality rates, but we were hoping in the Border Cancer Network that a new centre would look more closely at head and neck cancers and those are among the cancers that are on the increase,” Ms Warren said.

“The reality is the more isolated people are, the higher their mortality rate for cancer is and in our region there are many sites which are quite remote and it is hard to access even centres such as ours.

“This application looked at one of the largest population groups and one of the largest geographical areas and we didn’t get the funding because they looked at it on a state-by-state basis.

“We have missed out on an opportunity to provide these services and no one has explained why.

“It doesn’t make sense that they have ignored a population as big or larger than those areas that have been funded.”

Ms Warren said the frustration of her steering committee and the community at large was related to what she believed had been a bureaucratic process that resulted from the funding program’s criteria being examined in its purest sense, without the assessors having an understanding of the meanings of rural and regional.

Border oncologist Dr Craig Underhill said the rising rate of cancer diagnoses was purely a function of an ageing population.