Cassandra Fernando (Holt, Australian Labor Party) | Link to this | Hansard source

I move:

That this House:

(1) commends the Government for investing a further $158.4 million to expand the Commonwealth Prac Payment (CPP) to students training in ten additional frontline health professions;

(2) acknowledges that, from 1 July 2027, this expansion will build on paid prac already available to eligible teaching, nursing, midwifery and social work students, with around 95,000 students expected to receive support each year;

(3) recognises that:

(a) practical placements are a significant part of health degrees, making up more than a year of study in some courses; and

(b) travel, accommodation and relocation costs can discourage students from undertaking placements in regional and remote Australia, where health workforce shortages are often most acute;

(4) notes that eligible students currently receive $338.60 a week, benchmarked to the single Austudy rate and indexed annually, providing real cost of living relief while they undertake mandatory placements; and

(5) further acknowledges that expanding CPP will help more students complete their qualifications, growing the health workforce Australians rely on and strengthening Medicare.

At the heart of this motion is a simple principle: no Australian should have to choose between completing the training our country needs or keeping a roof above their heads. Mandatory placements turn years of study into vital skills used in our classrooms, hospitals and communities. They are essential but can place enormous financial pressures on students. When placement begins, life does not pause. Rent is still due. Groceries still need to be bought. There is still petrol, parking and child care to pay for. At the same time, students often have to reduce their hours at work or give up paid employment altogether.

Before coming to this place, I spent almost 15 years as a pastry chef at Woolworths, working shifts to pay the bills and keep my household running. I know what it means to rely on a regular wage—and the stress that comes when your ability to earn is disrupted. For too many students, this becomes placement poverty. I have heard of students sleeping in their cars because they could not afford accommodation while completing their training. Others have come close to abandoning their qualifications not because they lacked ability, passion or commitment but because they could no longer carry the cost.

In 2024, the Albanese Labor government acted. We established the Commonwealth prac payment for nursing, midwifery, teaching and social work students. They receive $338.60 a week during mandatory placement, benchmarked to the single Austudy rate and indexed annually. This support comes when students need it most. It allows students to focus on learning, developing their professional judgement and gaining hands-on experience rather than on calculating which bill can wait.

This motion recognises that next step. The government is investing a further $158.4 million to expand paid prac. From July 2027, the payment will be available to eligible students in 10 more frontline health professions: clinical psychology, physiotherapy, occupational therapy, speech pathology, paramedicine, radiography, pharmacy, rehabilitation therapy, audiology and podiatry. Each of these professions play an irreplaceable role in the lives of Australians. Australia needs these skills, but qualifying requires major commitment. In radiography, for example, practical training can account for more than a year of the degree. A student may need to relocate for weeks or months, cover travel and accommodation, and sometimes maintain rent in two places, all while earning less.

This challenge is greater outside our major cities. Regional placements often involve longer travel and higher relocation costs while regional and remote communities experience serious health workforce shortages. Removing these financial barriers makes it more realistic for students to train in those communities and consider building their careers there. With this expansion, around 95,000 students are expected to receive assistance each year. For families in Holt, this matters deeply. Holt is one of the youngest and fastest growing communities in Australia. Many young people want to build careers in health and care while their families work hard to manage the cost of rent, food and transport. Opportunities should depend on students' ability and determination, not on whether their family can afford months of compulsory unpaid training.

There is a clear difference in the approach of those opposite. At the last election, the coalition opposed replacing the Commonwealth Prac Payment with a concessional loan added to students' HELP debt. Under their plan, financial support during mandatory unpaid placements would have come at a cost of even more student debt. Through paid prac, the Albanese Labor government is helping more students complete their qualification, move into essential careers and strengthen the skilled workforce on which Medicare depends. It is practical reform that changes lives.

Steve Georganas (Adelaide, Australian Labor Party) | Link to this | Hansard source

Is the motion seconded?

Matt Gregg (Deakin, Australian Labor Party) | Link to this | Hansard source

I second the motion and reserve my right to speak.

Monique Ryan (Kooyong, Independent) | Link to this | Hansard source

I commend the government for this expansion of the Commonwealth Prac Payment for 10 additional allied health disciplines and thank the member for Holt for bringing this motion to the House. This announcement has been welcomed by students, universities and the health sector. Since I arrived in this place, I have called often and loudly for adequate support of placements in all care disciplines. Practical placements are an essential component of many degrees. They're mandated for students seeking to become nurses, midwives, teachers, social workers, OTs, physiotherapists, psychologists, vets, dentists, doctors and other occupations that are indispensable for the wellbeing of our communities.

It's a complete false economy to require those students to shoulder the cost of these placements alone. Many students are expected to complete hundreds, even thousands, of hours of mandatory placements while buying groceries and paying for their rent, their transport, their insurances, their equipment and other expenses of daily life in what is a prolonged cost-of-living crisis. During prac placements, students are often unable to maintain their usual paid jobs. This causes financial stress, deferments and sometimes, tragically, noncompletion of their university courses.

I've heard from students from Kooyong and around the country of how difficult things are for them. One occupational therapy student told me they were required to take more than 640 hours of unpaid placement in their final year. To make ends meet, they had to resign from one job, significantly scale back hours at two other jobs and get help from their parents to cover their accommodation costs. Another described classmates who would finish a day of study, have a brief sleep in their cars, work overnight hospitality shifts and then return to class the next morning. A nursing student told me she'd been forced to defer her final year of study because of an increase in mandatory placement hours that made it impossible to take care of her child. Another student, a single parent studying nursing and midwifery, said that they ultimately withdrew from placements because they just could not cope with the cost of child care and travel.

These are not isolated stories. They're examples of a system that has relied on students paying their own way to complete necessary training at the cost of their own financial security when our communities desperately need the skills that those students are working for. I welcomed the introduction of the Commonwealth Prac Payment in the 2024-25 Federal Budget. I congratulate the Minister for Education on this expansion of the scheme. Providing financial support to students who are undertaking placements is a sensible measure. It will help more Australians complete their qualifications. It will help them enter sectors in which workforce shortages are acute.

But, while this expansion is positive, it's not the end of the conversation. Extending prac placement to students in clinical psychology, physiotherapy, occupational therapy, speech pathology, paramedicine, radiography, pharmacy, rehabilitation therapies, audiology and podiatry on top of the existing coverage for nursing, midwifery, teaching and social work students, yes, is great cause for celebration, but the ongoing exclusion of other healthcare students is unfair and it is unsustainable.

Placement poverty is real. The Albanese government needs to explain to us and to the students who are experiencing that poverty why it has chosen to fix it for some but not for others—not for medical, dentistry, veterinary, nutrition and dietetics, optometry and osteopathy students. There is no fair, no equitable rationale for these omissions. They should be immediately addressed. Our health system, education system and our communities will be stronger when every student has the necessary support to complete their training and contribute their skills to Australia's health workforce.

If the objective of this expansion is to remove participation barriers and to strengthen Australia's future workforce, then the government must continue examining how this scheme can be fairly broadened and improved over time. The Albanese government has to continue closing the gap in education. It must extend paid prac to all care-sector students so that no-one has to interrupt their training to pay for their rent, to pay for their food and to look after their kids.

Matt Gregg (Deakin, Australian Labor Party) | Link to this | Hansard source

I'm very pleased to support this important motion by my good friend the member for Holt. Paid prac is good for students and it's good for the nation. The choice between making a living and pursuing your studies is not a real choice at all. If they can't pay the rent, there's no way they can finish their qualification. This isn't just a bad outcome for those individuals. It's a bad outcome for Australia, as it prevents smart, hardworking young people from entering the essential jobs we all rely on. When I was a teacher in regional Victoria, I met a lot of students who were choosing what they wanted to do next, and the requirement to do an unpaid placement was a decisive factor for them.

We're losing the very kinds of young people we're trying to push into professions. Regional kids are more likely to remain regional professionals, so it is essential that we ensure that opportunity is not decided by postcode or by income. A compulsory placement should be assessing whether you are ready to enter a profession, not whether your bank account can withstand a hit of weeks or months, and that's what it has become for too many young people trying to qualify for the jobs we really need them to enter into. If they need to do unpaid work, that turns completing a degree into a financial obstacle course. What paid prac does is address that last really important hurdle that ensures that they can finish their qualification if they're willing to do the hard work in order to complete it.

It is something that is critical to equity in our system. We are investing so much effort into ensuring that the opportunity to get a university qualification is available to all young people who are willing to do the work and have proved their capability to be successful. But it's become a financial minefield for far too many students. We've seen it in practical terms—people dropping out of courses simply because they can't afford to complete the final prac.

I think back to when I was training as a teacher. I was living in a caravan in a regional town, while eating mostly Easy Mac, and I was one of the lucky ones because I could afford to pay not only my rent but also to rent on a caravan park site. Not everyone could afford to do that.

A lot of students keep their heads just above water at the best of times, week by week, so they cannot afford to go weeks or months without a normal income, and that's what we expect them to do. Either students are required to give up a lot of their time working or they simply can't work at all because they're placed far away from where they normally reside. It's quite normal. A lot of young people cannot choose where they conduct their placement. Options and opportunities are limited, so sometimes they need to do these practicums far away from where they live, so they need somewhere to stay or they need to put more petrol in the car so they can get to and from there every day. We need to think of those practical issues when we're designing a system, because we can't separate our system from reality.

We know that this has been a problem for a very long time, and it is a barrier to entry to far too many Australians who would make terrific professionals. They have the right attitude, they have the capacity and this is just a small barrier that is really getting in the way of us achieving our goals.

We know that placement poverty is real and we know it's a barrier, so paid prac is there to alleviate that barrier for professionals that we really need to be expanding in number at this point in time. You look at the list of future allied health workers that this is supporting, and they're the very people we need with an ageing population and increasing support needs in our community. A shortage of these professionals would be unacceptable for most of our communities. I know that, in my own community of Deakin, we've got a lot of great young people, not all of whom could afford to make that sacrifice, but we also have an increasing number of older Australians who will be needing physiotherapists and those other allied health professionals as time goes on. So we need to make sure that we've got that pipeline of workers ready to meet that expanding demand for professionals that we already know are in short supply in many parts of Australia. It is essential that we confront and deal with this issue.

We've seen the success of paid prac in the professions that have already been enjoying it, including teachers and nurses, so we know it works. We know it makes a significant and material difference to the success of people completing these qualifications and that it ends a barrier confronted by far too many younger people, and other Australians of all ages, who are completing a qualification. It is just a small incentive, relative to the cost of investing in their degree. The last thing we want to do is invest a whole lot of money encouraging them to get into university and then invest a whole lot of money in getting them through units only for this final hurdle of a practicum to prevent them from completing the qualification. It undermines the financial investment we as the Commonwealth are making in these young people.

So this is a final piece of the puzzle. It's an essential piece of the puzzle, and I'm incredibly proud of the Albanese Labor government for stepping in with this really important initiative. I thank all those in the parliament who have given voice to the young people about this issue, because those have been important contributions as well, as have the contributions of many fellow members of the Albanese Labor government who've been pushing this for some time—and I include the wonderful member for Holt among them—because they realise that you can't separate— (Time expired)

Helen Haines (Indi, Independent) | Link to this | Hansard source

I'm delighted to speak today on the expansion of Commonwealth prac payments to allied health students studying psychology, physiotherapy, occupational therapy, speech pathology, paramedicine, radiography, pharmacy, rehabilitation therapies, audiology and podiatry. Eight weeks ago, Senator David Pocock and I brought a petition to this parliament, signed by more than 43,000 people, calling for the Commonwealth prac payments to be expanded to all allied health and medical students. As well as signing on to that call, thousands took the time to share their story with me about why they supported expanding Commonwealth prac payments. I've read hundreds of these stories and the member for Deakin has outlined some of the key themes that come from those stories—stories about the physical, financial and mental toll that mandatory unpaid placements are taking on our future healthcare professionals. A constituent of Indi wrote that her unpaid placement put her in such a financially vulnerable position that, one year on, her finances simply still have not recovered. Another constituent told me that they dropped out of uni altogether for this reason. What a loss. It's not just prospective students that support this. Senior clinicians, university lecturers, parents and everyday people put their names on this petition calling for more support for our healthcare students. One woman wrote, 'We need the workforce to save our lives.' She was a cancer survivor treated by radiation therapy.

We simply can't overestimate the impact of health professionals right across Australia. Every Australian relies on doctors, pharmacists, dentists, physios, psychologists and many, many other health professionals. But mandatory unpaid placements have been causing health students to delay and drop out altogether. It absolutely isn't good enough, and it's bad public policy.

That's why I'm so pleased that the government has listened to and acted on the calls of tens of thousands of Australians to expand Commonwealth prac payments to more allied health students, and I thank the member for Holt for bringing this motion to the House. It's an example of when government, Independents, backbenchers and frontbenchers work together with community to listen and improve things. I thank the Prime Minister and Minister Clare in particular for taking the next step in boosting the future of our health workforce. It's going to make a real difference to allied health students, and it will pay dividends.

But I have to call out the member for Deakin. It is not the final piece. The job is not done yet, because, unfortunately, some allied health professionals have been left out in the cold, along with medical, veterinary and dentistry students. I want to make the case for vets. I'm a rural Australian, and I've spoken in this place before about allied health and medical professions in detail. Regional Australia is in dire need of more vets, who do so much more in addition to looking after beloved household pets. A country vet is just as likely to be treating our horses, our cows and our sheep as our cats and dogs. Veterinarians are absolutely essential for protecting our biosecurity and agricultural productivity. Globally, they're playing a vital role in the early recognition of H5 bird flu, and we need more of them. We are crying out for them in the regions.

The Australian Veterinary Association's latest workforce survey found that 36 per cent of veterinary recruitment vacancies took 12 months or longer to fill, and, in regional areas, this number jumps to 44 per cent. Veterinary students need to complete 52 weeks of mandatory unpaid placement, so expanding Commonwealth prac payments to include veterinary students is a simple, practical way to support students—just as we're doing in the health sciences—to complete their degrees and address what is an absolutely manifestly problematic critical workforce shortage in rural and regional Australia.

The impacts of placement poverty caused by mandatory unpaid placements have been well established, as has the need for policies that grow our health and veterinary workforce. Knowing this, it's unclear to me what metric the government used to deem some students more deserving of Commonwealth prac payments than others. I congratulate the government on taking an important step in supporting more allied health students to complete their degrees, and I call on them: don't stop there. Students in medical, veterinary, dentistry and the remaining health degrees also deserve a fair chance at completing their studies, and we need them. I've said so many times in this place that health care is a team sport. We need our full team able to participate.

This practical placement policy is a solid policy. It's a commonsense policy. It is supported by the community, and I know it is already helping to secure Australia's future in health. We need to make sure it's expanded to those other professions, and we absolutely need to get our vets involved in this too.

Kara Cook (Bonner, Australian Labor Party) | Link to this | Hansard source

Imagine knowing that, to complete your degree or training, you need to stop earning an income, not for a day or two but for weeks and sometimes even months. You still have rent to pay. You still have groceries, petrol, looking after kids, childcare fees—but you also have hundreds of hours of mandatory unpaid placement ahead of you, and, without completing it, you don't graduate. That has been the reality for far too many Australian students. We've heard, today, many stories about what this means for students. It has meant choosing, sometimes, between the qualification they have worked years towards and simply being able to pay their bills. We have heard from students cutting back shifts, burning through their savings, having to give up their jobs or, worse still, giving up their degree or training entirely. Labor is changing that.

In 2024, Labor announced paid prac—the type of policy that only a Labor government would make. For the first time, the Australian government helped eligible students with the cost of living with paid prac while they completed the mandatory placements they needed to graduate. This was a fundamental change, and now we're taking the next step. From 1 July 2027, Labor is expanding paid prac to 10 more frontline health professions: clinical psychology, physiotherapy, occupational therapy, speech pathology, paramedicine, radiography, pharmacy, rehabilitation therapies, audiology and podiatry. If we think about how often Australians rely on these professions throughout their lives, it paints a picture of how important these professions are to our society. The paramedic who arrives on what might be the very worst day in a person's life, the physio helping you to walk again after surgery, the speech pathologist working with a child to find their voice—these professions matter, and we need more people choosing them.

In my electorate of Bonner, around 12,000 people already work in health care and social assistance, and, in the last census, more than 4½ thousand Bonner residents worked in hospitals alone and almost 9,000 people were studying at university or another higher education institution. Behind those numbers are thousands of people building careers and providing the services that families across my community depend on. Among those almost 9,000 students is the next generation of our health workforce.

We want students to graduate. We want them to take up these jobs, but, when we ask them to complete enormous amounts of unpaid practical training to get there, we limit their opportunity. For radiography students, practical training can add up to more than a year to their degree. Try fitting that around a normal work week. We cannot keep saying Australia needs more skilled health professionals while putting the financial barriers in the way of people trying to become them. Paid prac is about removing one of those barriers, but it is also part of something much bigger because a stronger Medicare isn't about just what we fund; it's about who is there to deliver.

You can invest in hospitals. You can open clinics. You can expand services, but ultimately somebody has to be there to provide the care. Australia needs these students, and we need to support them. Labor understands this. That is why we created paid prac, and it's why we're expanding it. It is all part of the government's commitment to a better future for all Australians. Paid prac is good cost-of-living policy. It is good education policy, and it's good health policy. Most importantly, it backs Australians who are putting in the work to build a better future for themselves and who will spend their careers looking after the rest of us.

Only Labor values these students, and we will continue to deliver and expand paid prac to support them.

Pat Conaghan (Cowper, National Party, Shadow Assistant Treasurer) | Link to this | Hansard source

I like to give credit where it's due in this place, and I commend the upcoming expansion of the Commonwealth Prac Payment. Any initiative that responsibly encourages our locally grown health workforce is to be commended and implemented as quickly as possible, so I take my hat off to the government for this policy. But this bill gives me an opportunity to make a further plea today on behalf of regional communities to go one step further and recognise the sectors of the health workforce that the current expansion ignores, sectors that we in the regions desperately need to be nurturing and increasing in number.

On this side of the floor, we absolutely welcome the inclusion of clinical psychology, physiotherapy, occupational therapy, speech pathology, paramedicine, radiography, pharmacy, rehabilitation therapies, audiology and podiatry. But that list just needs to be a little larger. It should include medical students, those studying to be a GP or a specialist. It should include optometry. It should include dietitians, and it should include veterinary students.

As you would expect in regional and rural areas, our GP shortage is rapidly getting worse with every single passing year. Finding a timely appointment with a GP in my electorate on the Mid North Coast of New South Wales has never been harder, which is currently forcing residents in need into emergency departments. While the urgent care clinic in Coffs Harbour is a welcome addition—they need one in Taree—it isn't open in the hours that we were promised when it was launched, because of staff shortages. We know that the pipeline of new graduates replacing our existing GP network is almost non-existent, and we need to address this immediately to ensure that our primary care network doesn't further erode. But sadly that would-be workforce is not included in this expansion, making general practice less appealing for students struggling with those expenses.

Every medical industry body is passionately pointing this out to us—none more eloquently than the RACGP's president Michael Wright, who stated:

On-the-job training is what has given us such expert clinicians all around this country, but this unpaid training places a major financial burden on many medical students. Placements really can act as a barrier for some of our brightest students choosing to go into medicine, and it's particularly hard for people from disadvantaged populations, people in rural areas, and people from lower socioeconomic groups. Out of all of these courses the medical degree is the longest, and the impact of these placements on finances are the greatest for future doctors, so excluding them from this, it just doesn't make any sense.

Then there are the allied health fields like optometry and dietetics. To best illustrate this, I want to read from a letter that I received from Poppy McIntyre from Port Macquarie. Poppy is an 18-year-old full-time pharmacy student at the University of Sydney, and she writes:

I know from experience that for many allied health students the greatest financial hardship occurs during mandatory clinical placements. These placements often require students to reduce or completely stop paid work while continuing to meet the cost of rent, transport, food, and study, placing many under severe financial stress. I was pleased to see the recent expansion of the Commonwealth Prac Payment to support more allied health students during mandatory placements, including me in pharmacy. But I was disappointed that students in other essential allied health disciplines remain excluded from this support, an exclusion that is difficult to justify given the placement requirements of these degrees.

Dietetics students are required to complete more than 800 hours of unpaid clinical placement, while optometry students typically undertake 400-600 hours of unpaid placement before they can graduate. The financial burden can be overwhelming and has the potential to discourage students from entering.

She goes on:

I respectfully urge you to advocate for the Commonwealth Prac Payment to be extended to include dietetics, optometry, and all allied health students …

Poppy, I couldn't have said it better myself.

Andrew Wilkie (Clark, Independent) | Link to this | Hansard source

The time allotted for this debate has expired. The debate is adjourned and the resumption of the debate will be made an order of the day for the next sitting.