Joe Hockey (North Sydney, Liberal Party, Manager of Opposition Business in the House) Share this | Hansard source

I join with the Minister for Health and Ageing in congratulating Ms Rosemary Bryant on her appointment as the first Commonwealth Chief Nursing and Midwifery Officer, and recognise that Rosemary Bryant is very well qualified to hold this position. She is currently Executive Director of the Royal College of Nursing, a position which she has held since 2000. She is also currently the second Vice-President of the Board of the International Council of Nurses, the international body for nursing, comprising 129 member nations and representing 13 million nurses. I note that Ms Bryant was previously director of nursing policy and planning in the Victorian government and had hands-on experience at the Royal Adelaide Hospital. She has also been involved in policy development with the World Health Organisation. Obviously, Ms Bryant is very well qualified.

I welcome the creation of this position. Nursing has not received the recognition that some would say it has most properly deserved, over many years, including under previous Labor governments. But the matter is being addressed and I congratulate the minister for that. I recognise that we do have workforce challenges not just in nursing but right across the health spectrum. The health workforce understandably demands more flexible work hours primarily as a result of the pressures on families with both parents working but also as a result of the fact that there are more and more women in the overall workforce, particularly in relation to doctors. They naturally enough bring common sense to the workplace in one way above that of men and that is to bring greater flexibility in the workplace. The challenge you face in relation to doctors flows through to the provision of primary health care. The challenge you find in relation to nursing is that it is an extremely challenging job and nurses more generally have had overall rather poor remuneration in relation to the tasks they have been asked to perform. That is probably one of the reasons that, for example, in New South Wales there are far more nurses not practising as nurses than there are actual nurses working in the profession. I think these workforce challenges are significant not just in the public hospital system run by the states but also as a general issue. There are significant challenges that need to be met head-on by all governments.

One of the reasons the previous Liberal-National government under John Howard introduced 25 Australian hospital nursing schools, costing $170 million, was to provide hospital based training rather than exclusively university based training for nurses. We wanted them to have real experience. The new government came in and abolished those training schools—they have abolished 25 Australian hospital nursing schools. The chief nurse might have said to the minister, ‘This is a bad idea’, as everybody else did, but the minister proceeded with it and is instead giving $39 million to nurses who return to the workforce and an extra $99 million to extra nursing places in the university and TAFE system. The net impact is that those nurses who have done all the hard yards, who have stayed in the system doing the difficult tasks, are in no way rewarded for their efforts. I think the government’s policy is heading in the wrong direction, and Ms Bryant has a considerable job ahead of her in trying to convince the government to get back on track and reinstate Australian hospital nursing schools and focus on retention of nurses rather than just bringing back nurses who were previously in the profession but who are no longer in it. There are also basic workforce issues like how to get greater flexibility into the workplace in relation to nursing.

I also particularly welcome the appointment of a midwifery officer. Midwifery is a hugely important job and it has been around for many years. In fact, my grandmother, who is now deceased but I am sure she is listening to me at this very moment, was a midwife in Jerusalem. In those days of course doctors were very hard to find, particularly in the 1930s. My father recounts to me how he used to carry my grandmother’s bag around to the various births. That was a hard thing for a seven- or eight-year-old to do at the time, I am sure. But in those days the midwife picked up the challenges of birth. In those days, through no fault of the midwives, there was a much higher infant mortality rate than there is today. Thank God for the advent of better health care. The infant mortality rate generally has improved, although it is still horrendous in Third World countries and still way too high in Indigenous communities. We should never underestimate the significance of the role of midwives and how they often provide the services that cannot be provided by doctors. I imagine that over 95 per cent—I do not know the exact figure—of midwives are women and therefore provide a very important role at key moments during the birthing process when it might be best to have not only a woman there but also someone who has experienced childbirth—which no man will obviously go through, at least not in our lifetime.

In terms of the maternity services review, I also welcome this. I think that it is an important initiative. Providing the best system for pregnancy, birthing and postnatal care is vitally important. It is also important for families who lose a child. Again, we underestimate sometimes the psychological impact of that. I note that the coalition promised $800,000 for Bonnie Babes for counselling services for families who have lost a child pre or post birth. I am very disappointed that the government failed to put that in their budget. It was a commitment we made at the last election, the important point being that it is a phone service. From my own ministerial experience I know that phone services are often used particularly at distressing moments, rather than face-to-face services, which are not always available particularly for people who are in remote and regional areas.

The ministerial statement does refer to other health reforms. I want to very generously congratulate the minister on having a policy in health that is generated by the health department or by her, and not by the Department of Treasury. The alcopops tax came out of Treasury, as we found out during estimates, and the Medicare levy surcharge, which is taking a baseball bat to private health insurance, came out of Treasury as well. So it is a welcome change and all Australians should applaud when we get health policy from the health minister and not from Treasury, and I join in supporting this wonderful new initiative.

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