Nurse Recruitment

Ms CLANCY (Elder) (15:03): My question is to the Minister for Health and Wellbeing. Can the minister please update the house on how this government has been recruiting nurses across the health system and any alternative approaches?

The Hon. C.J. PICTON (Kaurna—Minister for Health and Wellbeing) (15:03): I thank the member for Elder for her commitment to health, and in particular mental health and the work she does with our mental health nurses. The great news is that this government has been very busy recruiting extra nurses to work in our health system. We came to government with a commitment to recruit 300 extra nurses above attrition into our health system. People at the time said, 'This is an ambitious target. How will you be able to do that? Where will you get the nurses from?' These were all the questions we were getting.

I am happy to report to the house that not only have we met that but we have vastly exceeded our recruitment of nurses here in this state. In fact, we haven't just doubled it, we haven't just tripled it—we have more than quadrupled what we said that we would do at the last election. There are 1,462 more nurses now working for SA Health than was the case when we came to government. That's more nurses and midwives providing care right across the state, city and country to patients who need it. We have done this by bringing in extra graduate nurses, providing them the training and support they need; we have done this by recruiting from interstate and overseas; we have done this by bringing back nurses to the profession as well; and we thank those nurses for their incredible work.

I was asked by the member for Elder if there are any alternative approaches to nurse recruitment. Well, we did see one during the last term of parliament. We saw a government that had a policy of having terminations, of having redundancies of frontline nurses as part of their policy. In fact, during the course of the pandemic, 228 nurses were made redundant by the Marshall Liberal government—the government where the Leader of the Opposition sat around the cabinet table while nurses were being made redundant. It is absolutely shameful. It is a practice that we have stopped since coming to government.

The other alternative approach that we have seen in the past couple of days has been from the Leader of the Opposition with three announcements he has made. Very few people paid attention to them, but I paid attention to them and I am happy to update the house about those alternative approaches. The first one on the weekend was, he said, a $90 million package. Actually, the sum looks like $143 million that that one is going to cost you, so that's being added into the Treasurer's calculator. The result of that policy would be not hiring one extra nurse—not one extra nurse out of that policy on the weekend.

Yesterday, there was another policy that they announced. They said that this was going to mean $72 million. The facts are that it's either $100 million or $172 million, depending on whether nurses who have worked for over 20 years are eligible or not. If they are not, then you are giving them nothing for those nurses who have worked for more than 20 years in our system. What's the result of that? How many extra nurses would that recruit to our system?

An honourable member: I will guess zero.

The Hon. C.J. PICTON: Absolutely zero—zero extra nurses to our system from that policy. And today—another policy. I say the word 'policy', but with all these there was no policy document, just a press release. The Leader of the Opposition in this one today didn't even bother to say how much this was going to cost. It wasn't even mentioned in his press release at all—but don't worry: we will be providing that costing. The Treasurer and I will be making sure this goes into the calculator, and we are all looking forward to that day coming up in the next few months. The member for Flinders is going to have to come out and account for this cash splash: the Oprah Winfrey approach to economic management. Everybody gets a car is the approach that they've got, and you are going to have to account for it and say where the money is coming from.