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House of Assembly - Fifty-Fifth Parliament, First Session (55-1)
2023-02-23 Daily Xml
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Health Workforce

Mrs HURN (Schubert) (14:34): My question is to the Premier. Is the Premier aware of financial incentives being offered by other states to attract and retain frontline health workers and, if so, will South Australia do the same? With your leave, sir, and that of the house, I will explain.

Leave granted.

Mrs HURN: In a nationally competitive environment to attract and retain doctors and nurses, the Victorian Labor government has over $100,000 worth of incentives on the table from HECS fees to sign-up bonuses to scholarships.

The Hon. P.B. MALINAUSKAS (Croydon—Premier) (14:35): I thank the member for Schubert for her question, and it's a good one. It's a good one because we do operate within a highly competitive environment for the workforce generally, but that's particularly true for the health workforce, and that's exacerbated again by the fact that obviously the state government is undertaking a massive recruitment drive for additional health workers. It's a situation that we are monitoring very closely.

At the moment, we have largely been able to attain the additional employees to realise our schedule for putting the additional people on that I referred to earlier. The Victorian experience, I think, demonstrates just how competitive a market we do have to confront. We are alive to keeping our options open but we are not going to do that unless we think that it's absolutely necessary to do so.

The first order of business was to address enterprise agreements that were outstanding. I mentioned the ambos before. We have done the same with the nurses. We are very glad to have entered into what I think could be characterised as a substantial medium-term agreement with the ANMF that provides, obviously, wage increases that are higher than what was provided for initially, going up to 3 per cent per annum. But more than that, there are also bonuses structured within that agreement. So there are a range of things that we are already doing that we want to allow to run itself out to be able to achieve our ambitions.

Obviously, we don't operate in a world with an unlimited budget. If we go about paying for free university courses or pursuing some of the other policies that the Victorian government has done, we run the real risk of compromising our ability to put on yet more people, which is our number one objective. We are interested in making sure we attract, retain—retain as many people as we possibly can. We want more, not less. We can get more out of the budget if we are not having to go down the path that other jurisdictions have for whatever reason they have chosen.

I think part of the consideration in the Victorian government is what is happening in New South Wales. What we know from the South Australian experience is that for those people who enjoy an excellent job like being a nurse or a midwife, for instance, once they are in those jobs, they enjoy them, they are passionate about them and they are able to enjoy an outstanding standard of living here in South Australia that is arguably in advance of the experience interstate because they enjoy relatively comparable wages. Obviously, $100,000 per annum in South Australia is worth a lot more than $100,000 in Sydney or Melbourne.

So once we've got them, we can retain them, and that is a policy that has served us well and we expect will continue to serve us well into the future, particularly as we continue to ramp up the health workforce in this state.

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