Stephen Bates (Brisbane, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

Health care is one of the biggest employers in my electorate of Brisbane, with almost 12,500 people working as healthcare professionals. Many work in the Royal Brisbane and Women's Hospital, which provides more than one-tenth of patient services in the entire state of Queensland. Since my election I have had the privilege of speaking to many of these workers firsthand. I have healthcare workers in my family, my sister being a nurse and midwife, and I have friends who work in the industry. I have spoken with unions, peak bodies, primary health networks and not-for-profit groups in the healthcare sector. In all these conversations there is one consistent theme: hospitals and health services are understaffed and healthcare workers are burned out.

The public health system was already struggling from the former Liberal-National government ripping billions from our public hospitals and which has never been returned. Then, during the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, we praised healthcare workers for their heroic efforts. They put their own safety on the line as they worked overtime, providing the most essential work our society needed. The praise eventually dried up. But the health workforce shortages and chronic public health underfunding has continued.

I regularly speak with nurses forced to work double shifts because there are not enough staff to adequately care for the patients. These working conditions result in exhaustion and limit their ability to provide the best standard of care. But they have no choice. There is nobody else to fill these gaps. With healthcare workers being forced to work in wards that they're not experienced enough to feel confident in for longer hours and with more patients than they can reasonably care for, they are left with little option but to move on from their jobs. This has a severe impact on the quality of health care which patients receive.

When we lose workers we lose years of irreplaceable on-the-job experience. Meanwhile our hospital wait lists are growing and people are waiting years for essential care. This is simply unsustainable. Without rapid investment in public hospitals we cannot address the workforce shortages to provide high-quality health care to everyone who needs it. We will continue to lose our essential healthcare workers to burnout. Our healthcare sector is in desperate need of government support.

Instead of investing in our public healthcare system, Labor's first budget since its election decreased public hospital funding to the states and territories by $2.4 billion over the next four years. The Greens have been listening to the needs of our healthcare sector. We took a comprehensive platform to last year's federal election, to fully fund the public healthcare system, including equal hospital funding from the Commonwealth and states that would undo years of underfunding by the coalition: invest in our workforce, clear hospital waitlists and get dental and mental health into Medicare so that healthcare workers can provide the best standard of care to their patients.

By contrast, the Labor government is gutting public hospital funding to pay for submarines and the stage 3 tax cuts. They are also propping up big private health insurance corporations with billions of dollars every year in rebates for cooperations, subsidising their corporate profits. We want to stop those handouts and reinvest $59.4 billion back into the public health sector. Instead of funnelling private health rebates into the pockets of shareholders and providing tax cuts for politicians and billionaires, we could hire the healthcare staff we need to address workforce shortages and deliver a public health system that works for people, not profits. We owe it to healthcare workers around the country to make sure that they aren't bearing the burden of government underfunding in their own working lives. It is time that we once again start treating our healthcare workers as the heroes they are. The health care of our friends and families depends on it.

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