Thursday, 16 October 2025

 Georgie CROZIER (Southern Metropolitan) (18:03): (2026) If the 2000 nurses and midwifery graduates and the hundreds of paramedic graduates were watching today’s question time and listening to the Premier answer a question from the opposition around the failures in what the government has promised, where there are going to be no jobs for thousands of these young people next year and in the years to come, I think they would have been absolutely disappointed in what the Premier said. Let us not forget what happened back in 2022, an election pitch of spin and another hollow promise, which has been broken. In a media release from the Premier – at the time it was Daniel Andrews – the big spin was ‘building an army of home-grown health workers to care for Victorians’ and ‘Making it free to study nursing and midwifery’.

This was a hollow promise for these thousands of young people who have not got a job to go to. That is the point, and I have raised the point that without this workforce Victoria’s health system, which is already under immense strain and relying on overtime and costly agency staff, is not going to have the staff to come in and build the workforce for the future. There are serious flow-on effects when that occurs. We have already got record ambulance ramping. There is reduced access to emergency care. The extensive elective surgery waitlist has really not been impacted to bring it down from the 58,000-odd patients that are still waiting for their surgery. If we are not giving these young graduates placements, then we are not fulfilling that promise and obligation that the Labor government made back in 2022.

There needs to be a workforce plan; I do not think this government has a plan at all. They are plugging holes because of this spiralling, out-of-control debt. There are cuts going on everywhere. There are memos going out saying, ‘The funding model’s changing. You won’t be getting your block funding or grants funding anymore. It’ll all be activity based.’ We are seeing a secret amalgamation happen, and in the midst of this we have got a workforce that has thousands of young people that are not going to have a job and will leave the state. The action I seek is for the minister to release the health workforce plan that the government has developed – that includes nurses, midwives and paramedics.