Sharon Bird (Cunningham, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I want to take the opportunity in the adjournment debate this evening to endorse the statements of my colleague the member for Richmond and speak on behalf of the many hardworking nurses in our electorates. I want to put on the record the concern they have about the comments made by the Minister for Health and Ageing in this House this week. We have had a level of debate this week around the fact that the Department of Employment and Workplace Relations has commissioned some modelling to determine the impacts of either changing the current IR policy or expanding it. Indeed, the expansion options it was asked to look at included increasing the number of staff on AWAs across the country and, in particular, those who are state government employees.

Clearly that would be of concern to people like nurses and teachers, firefighters and so on. My colleague formerly worked as a police officer and I formerly worked as a teacher, so I think we have pretty well got them all covered. The issue of concern is that obviously when government ask for this sort of modelling to be done there has to be some intention to it. It is, one would assume, not a whim about which the government thought, ‘That would be interesting to read on the weekend. Why don’t we spend some taxpayers’ money commissioning something to entertain ourselves with?’ I give the government the benefit of the doubt—and it is a long benefit of the doubt, given the topics in the House this week—that they would not be looking at wasting that money, so one must assume that this research has a purpose.

The Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations has scoffed at the idea that there is a secret plan. He says that it is merely research covering existing policies, having a cursory look at what would happen if the policies were reversed and what the costs of that would be. I do not know whether he is talking about his own reversal of the introduction of the so-called fairness test. Perhaps he is concerned that his own amendments are now going to have a negative impact on the government’s industrial relations reforms, and he might be thinking of revisiting that after the election. I think that many people are suspicious that that may be the case. This was a series of issues that were of clear concern to state government employees.

We saw government ministers come to the dispatch box this week to have their little say about an ACTU campaigning strategy. Rhetoric and hyperbole are not uncommon in this place, but it seems to me that the Minister for Health and Ageing always manages to take it just that bit beyond the pale. I refer to his statements in the House yesterday where he was talking about the nurses union becoming involved in this campaign. His comments about the nurses participating in a political campaign were that they would be politicising every hospital. His actual words were:

... now you have the politicisation of every hospital.

Coming from this government, I think that is an amazing accusation. In the Illawarra Mercury today there is a letter from a parent who attended the opening of a new Catholic high school in the member for Throsby’s seat. This parent was absolutely horrified by the extraordinarily political nature of Senator Concetta Fierravanti-Wells’s address to the opening of that particular school. The parent made the point that the senator could not help but run an entirely political message to parents at the opening of a new school. I would suggest that if the government is particularly concerned about political campaigning tactics it might check its own backyard before it goes out and criticises unions for political activity, which one would think would have been one of the reasons why workers would have formed unions in the first place.

In particular, the Minister for Health and Ageing went on to say that nurses would be so busy running around with their political activism that they would be indoctrinating patients instead of giving them their medication. He said that they would be brainwashing patients instead of giving them the standard health care that they deserve at the bedside and that elective surgery lists were blowing out because nurses were doing this. It was just over the top. It was disgraceful for the Minister for Health and Ageing, in particular, to attack nurses in that way.

The argument that working people are not able and do not have a right to be involved in political activity is the height of arrogance. It reflects a government that now thinks that anybody who dares to put an opinion of their own needs to be gagged. (Time expired)