AUSTRALIA (Commonwealth Union)_Numerous frontline healthcare professionals stood with Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews when he announced in August that his state would pay for the degrees of more than 10,000 nursing and midwifery students.
However, when opposition leader Matthew Guy introduced his own $325 million “future health workforce plan” on Tuesday that would see even more staff educated for free, there were no frontline health professionals there.
Within hours, the Victorian chapter of the Australian Nursing and Midwifery Federation endorsed Labour’s proposal and argued that the Coalition’s announcement and funding “don’t add up.” “Their plan lacks detail, has no timelines and it is silent on committing to legislated nurse/midwife patient ratios exposing a shallow understanding of what’s needed or how to support a workforce during a pandemic,” branch secretary Lisa Fitzpatrick said.
Fitzpatrick says she met with the opposition’s health spokesperson, Georgie Crozier, in early July and “election commitments were not discussed”. “I’ve only met Mr Guy once, in the parliamentary dining room when I introduced myself prior to the 2018 election when he was opposition leader. I’ve not heard from him since,” Fitzpatrick says.
It makes sense that the union, which represents over 97,000 workers, would support Labour.
What is more remarkable is the opposition’s tenacious pursuit of an election campaigned on health, despite limited backing from those on the front lines and the party’s decades-old reputation for slashing staff and services.
The Coalition has promised to build or renovate 15 hospitals since June, including spending $900 million to build a new 275-bed Werribee Royal Children’s hospital, $550 million to rebuild Caulfield Hospital, $400 million to build an infectious disease hospital, and $400 million to renovate Maroondah Hospital. (The government announced it will reconstruct the hospital for $1 billion the day after the Coalition announced it would build a hospital in Maroondah.)
Given the labour scarcity and supply chain issues, a number of unions, policy experts, and medical professionals have expressed concern about how the facilities would be built and staffed.
Fitzpatrick claims that it is difficult to trust the Coalition, citing their promise to uphold the nurse-to-patient ratios made in opposition at the 2010 election. Once in office, cabinet-in-confidence documents described a strategy to fight the ratios while simultaneously reducing the number of nurses employed in hospitals and replace them with less expensive health aides. This strategy was expected to save around $473.7 million over the course of four years.
The proposal also called for the use of split shifts and four-hour shifts.
Union members responded by engaging in 121 days of industrial action, which included 14 days of rolling work stoppages at 15 public hospitals around Victoria. “The Coalition has never taken ownership of its strategy to cut nurses and midwives, nor the impact it would have had on our pandemic response had they been successful,” Fitzpatrick said.
Paramedics engaged in a salary dispute two years later, and they later campaigned for Andrews in the 2014 election by spray-painting their ambulances with messages like “throw out the Liberals”.
Additionally, there is the legacy of previous Liberal premier Jeff Kennett, who in the 1990s privatized key services, eliminated more than 45,000 employees from the state’s bureaucracy, decreased hospital spending, and closed more than 300 public schools.
Under a Coalition government, Andrews likes to bring up the subject of “cutting and closures” repeatedly. In the second paragraph of his news statement, which he released on Wednesday, he mentions “$75 million in cuts to aged care when the Coalition was last in office.”
