Eric Abetz (Tasmania, Liberal Party, Minister for Fisheries, Forestry and Conservation) Share this | Hansard source

As I think more and more Australians are coming to realise, the misinformation campaigns run by the ACTU and aided and abetted by the Australian Labor Party have caused a great degree of confusion within the minds of the Australian public. Therefore, it is appropriate for us as a government to put the facts on the record. And the facts are these: the Australian public has been provided with misinformation and misleading commentary about how the pay and conditions of Australia’s nurses are set; advertising was placed in the national newspapers at the weekend to clarify the situation with Australia’s nurses so that they know where they stand.

The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare publication titled Nursing and midwifery labour force 2004 shows that around two-thirds of nurses are employed in the public sector. These nurses have their pay and conditions set by state Labor governments, yet the ACTU, the nurses union and other organisations deliberately mislead the Australian public in relation to that. The publication also shows that around 14 per cent of all nurses are residential aged care nurses. The majority of residential aged care nurses—around three-quarters—are employed in the private sector.

Nurses working under the federal workplace relations system have the protection of the fairness test when negotiating AWAs so that penalty rates and overtime cannot be exchanged without fair compensation. All employees in the federal system have a set of protections which all employers must abide by.

In relation to government advertising generally, can I make this point: state Labor governments around Australia have in fact outspent that which we as an Australian government spend on communications campaigns. Do you ever hear one word of criticism from Mr Rudd about state Labor advertising? Never once! Mr Beattie’s watermelon smiling face appeared in all the national newspapers promoting how well he was running Queensland—despite ‘Dr Death’ and other issues. Queensland taxpayers funded those first advertisements, and guess what? Not a squeak! There was not a squeak from the former mandarin of the Queensland government Mr Rudd. What that shows is that this mandarin is fast turning into a lemon, because he is not able to deliver on his policy with his state Labor colleagues. He says he is going to cooperate with his state Labor colleagues. You know what that means, don’t you? It means huge advertising expenditure way beyond that which has ever been seen.

In relation to nurses, the feedback we have got is that a lot of nurses now feel very satisfied that the misinformation being put out by the Nursing Federation is simply a political ploy to damage the government and does not have the interests of nurses at heart.