Tony Abbott (Warringah, Liberal Party, Leader of the House) Share this | Hansard source

Thanks to the work of the Howard government, the great work of Australian nurses is now recognised through a Medicare rebate for the first time. As far as the government is concerned, we want nurses to be nurses; but members opposite want nurses to be pawns in political campaigns run by the ACTU. The ACTU’s notorious dirty tricks manual cites Nepean Hospital as a case study in how to run a political campaign out of a healthcare institution. I cite Workers Online from last December:

Workers at Nepean Hospital, the biggest workplace in the federal marginal seat of Lindsay ... are running the first workplace-based Rights at Work campaign in Australia. With a 3000 strong workforce and hundreds of patients and their families moving through each week, the potential for campaigners is extraordinary.

I can inform the House that at Nepean Hospital nurses have been pressured into attending union meetings, and at least one worker has been threatened with losing his job if he votes Liberal. For weeks at a time walls and fences have been used as billboards for union propaganda, and for weeks at a time the hospital looked more like a polling booth for just one candidate than a proper healthcare institution. I say to the patients at Nepean Hospital and other hospitals in Australia: if some odd-looking person with a stethoscope around his neck approaches you—

See this speech in context