Health workforce
Brad BATTIN (Berwick – Leader of the Opposition) (14:14): My question is to the Premier. In 2022 the government spent $270 million encouraging years 11 and 12 students to study nursing and midwifery by making it free of charge for 10,000 students. However, next year more than 2000 graduate nurses and midwives will be left without a position in the acute health system. To add insult to injury, this means they will also miss out on the $7500 promised by the government. How does the Premier explain to 2000 graduate nurses and midwives why her government’s promise is not worth the paper it is written on?
Jacinta ALLAN (Bendigo East – Premier) (14:14): I would not have expected a question from the Leader of the Opposition talking about nurses in a week when we have had the Shadow Treasurer out there being critical of our investment through public sector funding of frontline workers. But here we are, a question from those opposite about our election commitment in 2022 to provide university support for young people to get in and study nursing. And why did we do this? Because we value our nurses and midwives. We respect our nurses and midwives. Some of us have been around long enough to remember the Liberal Party – we are in polite company, Speaker, but we all remember – and literally the middle finger that was shown to nurses when those opposite were in government. We back our nurses and midwives, and the way you back your nurses and midwives is by doing the following: you fund our hospitals, you build new hospitals. You not only do that; when the times are toughest for our nurses, like they were during that period of the pandemic, we back our healthcare workers. We recognised that during that period of time so much was being asked of our nurses. And who was undermining that public health effort? The Liberal Party, who time and again wanted to see that pandemic – ‘Let it rip’ was their mantra during that period of time –
James Newbury: On a point of order, Speaker, the Premier is debating the question.
The SPEAKER: I ask the Premier to come back to the question.
Jacinta ALLAN: I was referring to that period of the pandemic, and it is an important point in time in terms of the investments that we have made in our healthcare system. Since 2021 not only have we grown the healthcare workforce by more than 50 per cent, we have funded and supported the recruitment of an additional 7000 nurses. And what are those nurses doing? They are caring for us. They are working in hospitals and community health settings right across our state. That is why we made that commitment to bring in more graduate nurses. We are working with the nurses union. The Minister for Health is working with those proud, strong union members at the ANMF, and I would like to acknowledge Maddy Harradence for her work and the leadership that she provides, because it is by working with your representatives in the union that you can work through how we can support these graduate nurses to find their future in our great hospital system.
Brad BATTIN (Berwick – Leader of the Opposition) (14:18): Daniel cannot secure a graduate nursing position despite completing his nursing degree and extensive clinical placements across multiple hospital wards. How many Victorian nurse graduates like Daniel are being forced to move interstate because your government has failed to employ the very people our health system needs?
Jacinta ALLAN (Bendigo East – Premier) (14:18): I say this to the Leader of the Opposition because he may not be aware of the fact that the graduate process – matching those graduates who have gone through that program that we have funded for their university support – is not yet concluded, and the reason why it is not yet concluded is because we have a big and busy hospital system where we are supporting those graduate nurses to find their place and their future in that hospital system. I point out to the Leader of the Opposition that you could never ask this question of a Liberal government, who would not have funded university degrees, who would not have backed the nurses with a 28 per cent EBA outcome, who would not have –
James Newbury: On a point of order, Speaker, the Premier is debating the question again.
Jacinta ALLAN: I will turn the answer around the other way. Only Labor has nurse-to-patient ratios, only Labor backs nurses through an EBA, only Labor has supported nurse graduates with the support for them to study at university and only Labor will continue to back our healthcare workforce day after day.