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Legislative Council - Fifty-Fourth Parliament, Second Session (54-2)
2021-10-14 Daily Xml
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Public Hospital Doctors

The Hon. C. BONAROS (14:46): I seek leave to make a brief explanation before asking the Minister for Health and Wellbeing a question about public hospital doctors.

Leave granted.

The Hon. C. BONAROS: In what has been described as an unprecedented show of solidarity, about 400 public health doctors held a stop-work meeting yesterday to be updated on their EB negotiations with the state government. These are the very frontline doctors who worked around the clock for the past 18 months to protect the community from the ravages of the COVID-19 pandemic, some of whom are known to regularly work double shifts to ensure enough qualified doctors are on duty.

The meetings that I refer to were organised by SASMOA, the doctors' union, which informed its members the government had rejected its proposal for a three-year deal with a pay increase of between 2 and 2.4 per cent a year, which also included initiatives to address excessive workloads, fatigue and bullying and improving conditions for trainee doctors.

SASMOA didn't know how many doctors would turn out, especially after Dr McGowan, SA Health CEO, sent a communique warning the doctors their pays would be docked if they attended the stop-work meeting. But Dr McGowan need not have worried because his attempt to poke the bear backfired spectacularly. The doctors showed up with their feet, all 800-plus of them. My questions to the minister are:

1. Do you agree with Dr McGowan's communique and threats to doctors that they would be docked pay for attending the stop-work meeting, or do you believe Dr McGowan shouldn't be kicking these doctors, who are on the brink of exhaustion, in the teeth and focus on resolving the dispute?

2. How many other public health workers, nurses, orderlies, cleaners, etc., are threatened for attending stop-work meetings?

3. Don't you agree the current deal being offered by the state government is an insult to those frontline health doctors?

The PRESIDENT: The Treasurer I think is taking a point of order, is he?

The Hon. R.I. LUCAS (Treasurer) (14:48): No, Mr President, I propose to answer the question as I am the minister that handles all the EB negotiations.

Members interjecting:

The PRESIDENT: Order! Before the Treasurer does do that—

Members interjecting:

The PRESIDENT: Order! I am speaking! Before the Treasurer answers that question, I will remind the Hon. Ms Bonaros that I think three out of the four questions were actually seeking an opinion and I am going to ask the Treasurer to answer the relevant parts of that series of questions.

The Hon. R.I. LUCAS: I am happy to respond to those parts of the questions I can. I am very happy to speak to the Hon. Ms Bonaros after question time to provide any further information that she might wish.

I am the minister responsible for handling EB negotiations with all public sector workers, including SASMOA. In the discussions we have had so far with SASMOA they, together with a couple of other unions, have said the major issue for them is really the resourcing levels in their particular area of the public sector—obviously health facilities and hospitals in particular.

As the Minister for Health has just outlined, but I can add to that as well, the government is acknowledging that by a massive increase in resources going into health. The Hon. Ms Bonaros will know that at the time of the budget we highlighted the fact that our budget this year was almost $1 billion more than the budget of the last Labor government.

As the Minister for Health has just outlined in his very comprehensive series of answers to questions, we have added to that particular record spending level by the additional initiatives that he and the Premier have announced in recent weeks, but in particular in the last couple of days. I am sure there will be one or two more still to come in the near future.

We are responding to the issues that SASMOA are raising and that is that they are saying, 'We need more resources, we need more spending, we need more funding, we need more staff,' and as the minister outlined—I won't repeat it again—they are already out there looking for 350-odd extra nurses. We are going to employ up to the 1,200 potentially eligible nursing and midwife graduates in the period leading up to the end of this year.

The government acknowledges the issues that SASMOA is raising. They are saying to us that their key issue isn't salaries. Their key issue is actually resources in the health sector and hospitals and we are acknowledging that. Those issues are not formally part of EB negotiations. Nevertheless, they do raise the issues. We say, 'Look, the government is responding. We hear what you say. We acknowledge the issue that we need to provide additional resources and we are doing so.'

In relation to the issue of the salary increase, which SASMOA says isn't the most important issue for them, bear in mind part of what we have to do with this SASMOA negotiation is the ICAC has actually reported on the working conditions and salary conditions of salaried medical officers and has actually made some very strong recommendations in relation to concerns they have about the way the employment arrangements work and the EB arrangements work with some of our salaried medical officers.

We have to remember that with salaried medical officers, they are very hardworking, we acknowledge the excellence of the work that they have done, but they are not at the lower end of the pay spectrum within the public sector. I think it has been identified in the Auditor-General's Report that two medical officers with rights of private practice are earning between $1 million and $1.5 million.

There are about 300, I think, that are earning more than half a million dollars a year with rights of private practice and what we pay them. Their current salaries compare more than favourably with the salaries that are paid to equivalent doctors in other state and territory jurisdictions. They are not at the bottom of the rankings. They compare favourably, depending on which classification level you are at.

In relation to what the government has offered—they have asked for 2.5 per cent, we have said no—most of the recent settlements that we have settled have been between 1.2 and 2 per cent, and the government has been negotiating a salary increase of around 1.5 per cent, unless there are productivity trade-offs and we were prepared to talk to them about that.

In relation to the final point the honourable member has raised, I haven't seen all the detail of the missive from the CEO but the second part of the missive is entirely consistent with the approach the former government adopted and we have adopted with previous industrial disputes with teachers and other public sector workers. That is, if you take time off work to go on a protest meeting, then the taxpayers of South Australia are not going to pay you for taking time off work for a protest meeting.

That is an entirely reasonable proposition. It is a position we adopted in the teachers dispute and the teachers' union, in the end, accepted that. If they wanted to march in the streets and sing Johnny Farnham songs, that was terrific but we weren't going to use taxpayers' money to pay for it. So it's entirely the same position, that second part of the email or whatever it was from the CEO, which is consistent with our general position, adopted by the former government and adopted by this government, that if you are taking protest action and not working then you can't expect the taxpayers to pay you for that.

The PRESIDENT: The Hon. Ms Bonaros has a supplementary.

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