John Howard (Bennelong, Liberal Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Greenway for asking me a question regarding the practical response to the shortage of nurses in Australia which I announced on Friday at the St George Private Hospital, along with the Minister for Health and Ageing. What this very practical policy does not involve is the establishment of a committee or an agency; it just involves doing something.

I saw the Leader of the Opposition with his pseudo-American, ersatz launch of the campaign on Saturday. There he was, complete with—what do you call them?—teleprompters, rear vision mirrors, those things that have your words printed on them. I thought to myself, ‘Here is American politics, arrived in Australia big-time.’ I thought I was the bloke who was too close to the Americans! You could have fooled me, Mr Speaker.

Anyway, let me return to something that is far more important than the Leader of the Opposition’s meeting in Penrith, and that is the practical announcement I made on Friday, along with the health minister, to establish 25 Australian hospital nursing schools at a cost of $170 million over five years. What this will do is allow young men and women to leave school and start working as a nurse immediately. So, far from it being a return to the old days, it is an embrace of a common-sense approach. I have been greatly encouraged by the positive reaction to this proposal from so many men and women in the nursing profession. This will provide enrolled nurse hospital based training within major public and private hospitals at diploma or advanced diploma level.

What the government will do is fund infrastructure for on-site educational facilities and pay for up to four clinical training staff at each participating hospital. Over five years we will provide $20 million in wage subsidies to provide incentives to students. It will be $500 a student per week to hospital nursing schools for the first three months that the young man or woman is undertaking the training, recognising that in those first three months the hospital will need some financial help in order to engage them. We will pay a tax-free $1,500 commencement bonus and a $2,500 completion bonus per student, paid to each hospital nursing school, plus the direct payment to students—the tax-free bonus—of $2,000 after six months and a further tax-free bonus of $3,000 on completion.

We expect more than 500 students undertaking training alone in those 25 schools each year. These places, let me stress, are over and above the places provided through the university system. They include the 3,700 new commencing nursing places since 2005, which will grow to over 10,100 by 2011. It also includes the 395 new commencing university places announced by the Minister for Education, Science and Training last week. We have increased funding for nursing clinical training from $690 to $1,045 per nursing unit of study and we have increased the per student funding for university based nursing courses next year by $109 per student. Therefore, in total last week we increased nursing training places by some 900—and that, incidentally, is broadly consistent with the call by the Australian Nursing Federation and other peak nursing groups for 1,000 initial nursing places for training from 2009.

I mention that because the Leader of the Opposition, in a negative way, was bagging this proposal, saying it was wrong, saying it was a lurch back to the 1950s. Yet I have in my possession a letter dated 13 August 2007, over the joint signatures of Jill Iliffe, the Federal Secretary of the Australian Nursing Federation; Rosemary Bryant, the Executive Director of the Royal College of Nursing; Karen Cook, the Chief Executive Officer of the Australian Nursing and Midwifery Council; Sally Goold, the Chairperson of the Congress of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Nurses; John Daly, Chair of the Council of Deans of Nursing and Midwifery; and Barbara Vernon, the Executive Officer of the Australian College of Midwives. All of these organisations together wrote to the minister and said what they wanted was an additional 1,000 fully funded places each year beginning in 2009. The combined announcements I made and the minister made last week provide 900 of that 1,000. So for the life of me I do not know what the Leader of the Opposition was getting at last week when he attacked this proposal.

This is a practical response to a difficult issue. It will encourage people to go straight from school. People who want to be nurses can become nurses from day one. They will have the opportunity of experiencing what it is like from the very beginning. If they do not like it, they will give it away, but they will not have to spend some 18 months to two years at university before having any real interaction with a hospital for a sustained period of time. It makes common sense to provide an additional stream, and I want to commend the minister for working up this proposal. He has brought his customary energy to it and I think it is going to be widely accepted in the Australian community. I do not for the life of me know what the Leader of the Opposition was getting at last Friday.

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