Wednesday, 11 May 2022

Ministers statements: health services

Mr ANDREWS (Mulgrave—Premier) (14:06): I am delighted to be able to again confirm for the benefit of all honourable members that last week’s budget had a $12 billion boost for our health and hospital services. Never before perhaps has there been a more important time for us to acknowledge that COVID—this one-in-100-year event, this wildly infectious and deadly condition—has done a lot of damage to our health system. There is no denying that. The important thing to do now is to listen to not just those who work in our health system but the community more broadly and make sure that we provide strong and enduring support to each and every hospital, to each and every corner of the state, and therefore, through that support, to each and every patient.

Having those 7000 additional health professionals I spoke about earlier on is very much different and much better than cutting staff and cutting budgets: 1125 per year nursing graduate positions, so people who are in their final year of university this year will be getting a job next year; people who will do their final year of nursing, their undergraduate education, next year will be employed the following year; additional mental health staff, noting that that is such a key priority of our government, having held Australia’s only royal commission into these matters and having provided literally billions of dollars in additional funding to build a much better system; and additional ambulance paramedics—building on strong and consistent investments each budget, every budget.

Just on that point, we know that our ambulance paramedics do an amazing job—they do their very best. For a long time they did not have the support that they needed, and we had the worst response times ever when we came to government. We turned that around and delivered the very best response times, and we are determined—we are determined—to repair the damage of this pandemic and get back to those very best response times. And even then we will not settle; we will keep on working hard every day, investing in these health professionals. This is the best way to thank them—to back them every day.