Andrew Southcott (Boothby, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I am very pleased to speak about nurses and to respond to this MPI, which is a very flimsy MPI. I think the Minister for Health really got to the motivation behind this MPI. The nurses union is in town and they say, 'Jump' to the Labor Party—and the Labor Party asks, 'How high?'

As a new candidate I remember being advised by the branch secretary of the Australian Nursing Federation to come and discuss the conditions at Flinders Medical Centre. It was a stunt. As well as me, she invited the local state Liberal members of parliament. What we heard was that this place was the most terrible place you could possibly imagine. I remember at the end saying, 'Look, I actually work there and this does not reflect in any way the conditions at that hospital.' You can imagine my surprise when that branch secretary of the nurses federation emerged some months later as the Labor candidate for Adelaide. Sadly, she did not win Adelaide. At the next federal election, she emerged as the Labor candidate for Makin. Sadly, the voters of Makin did not support her then either. It was realised that Gail Gago—the South Australian branch secretary of the nurses federation—and voters did not really get along, so they tucked her away in the Legislative Council. It is an example, I think, of how poorly health workers have been represented by some of these unions. We saw a really good example of this with the Health Services Union—the actions of those officials.

But, seeing as how we are talking about nurses, I would like to focus on the development of practice nurses. This very proud initiative was pushed forward by Michael Wooldridge, then the Minister for Health and Family Services. You now find that almost every general practice has a practice nurse, someone who is trained as a registered nurse. This provides more capacity in primary care. It means that, in areas like diabetes, chronic disease management, asthma and all sorts of things, the practice nurse can focus on certain things and allow the general practitioner to focus on diagnostics. It has been a great development. We have seen it happen around the world and it happened in Australia under a Liberal government. When Tony Abbott was Minister for Health, we saw this expanded through Medicare, using the practice incentive payment introduced by Minister Wooldridge, as well as using the team care arrangements and an expansion of Medicare in that area.

The Labor Party have talked a lot about nurses, but what they have not mentioned is that they wanted to pull $437 million out of Medicare which was going towards practice nurses. That was something that we, as the then opposition, opposed. In our policy, we made it very clear that we would protect and maintain the $437 million of support for practice nurses that the Rudd-Gillard government planned to strip out of Medicare for these services.

We have heard a lot of rhetoric about nurses but, when it comes to substance, we have the runs on the board. Practice nurses are a great example, but it does not stop there. We have initiatives to provide scholarships for nurses, including $13.4 million for 500 additional scholarships for nursing and allied health. This will be for a maximum value of $30,000 per scholarship. The majority of nurses employed in Australia are employed in acute care settings in hospitals, and we are increasing hospital funding to state and territory governments every year. The increases are six per cent, nine per cent and nine per cent over the forward estimates, and we are providing more than $5 billion in additional hospital funding for the states over the next four years.

When you look at the scholarships that are available for nurses, when you look at the practice nurse incentives and when you look at the funding that is going to hospitals, this MPI just does not stack up. The underlying motivation of the MPI comes down to the industrial arm of the Labor Party muscling the political arm of the labour movement—that is, the Labor Party opposition in this place. We have had a number of nurses represent us, such as Trish Worth and Trish Draper—great members. (Time expired)

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