For a brief moment, let’s reminisce and embrace the déjà vu of the COVID pandemic. For months, we were homebound, living off a daily diet of Uber Eats, analysing Taylor Swift’s Evermore or the anticipated Friends Reunion, and drafting up another email about why we couldn’t join the Zoom due to “unforeseen internet problems”.
However, it was in the midst of all this that the term “essential workers” became plastered on our televisions and news pages; politicians riding on the coattails of burnt-out and high-demand health workers. Medical staff were forced out onto the frontlines amidst absolute chaos, with miserable navigation from political leaders because, to be fair, no one knew quite how to navigate a pandemic to begin with. Doctors, nurses, and midwives didn’t get the opportunity to remain at home — they were declared “heroic” and “brave” on national television, until our ticket out of lockdown, in the form of a syringe, gave us the opportunity to move on and forget about their sacrifice. Now, they’re just medical staff. Our underfunded, underpaid, and underresourced medical staff; a suffocating public sector utterly paralysed by the mismanagement of funds.
For the first time this century, New South Wales medical staff walked out on strike — for three days, from the 8th to the 10th of April. For the first time this century, NSW medical staff mass-cancelled elective surgeries, with thousands of doctors from over 30 hospitals demonstrating they’d reached breaking point under the Minns Government. However, it’s not the first time this century our politicians have had to be reminded just how essential our “essential workers” are. Perhaps the second time’s the charm!
Their demands are grounded in the belief that safe and reasonable working conditions will better ensure the safety of their patients. They’re demanding guaranteed 10-hour breaks in between shifts, and a pay rise of 30 per cent, so that their work is not exploited under a Labor government which pays them dismal rates compared to Victoria and Queensland. A first-year registrar in Queensland has a base salary over 18k higher than one in NSW. A fifth-year registrar in Victoria has a base salary over 26k higher than one in NSW. For better pay and cost of living, we’re witnessing our doctors abandoning the state for places such as Melbourne, where rent prices are 22 per cent cheaper than in Sydney. To summarise: poor working conditions are leading to a lack of workers in the NSW public health sector, so now you’re producing exhausted staff within an underpaid, unemployable industry. They’re demanding to be paid properly, for the job they’ve been doing with or without the government’s due support.
In an attempt to deal with the worker shortage, the recent Federal budget revealed the Commonwealth Prac Payment will deposit $319.50 per week to 68,000 higher education students and 5,000 VET students completing mandatory practicum placement under a tertiary qualification in “teaching, nursing and midwifery, and social work”. Acknowledging the need to “invest in critical workforces” comes in response to the alarming cost of living facing students already in remarkable amounts of debt. If you’re scraping by to pay rent as it is, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that hundreds of hours of unpaid nursing placement isn’t exactly an option for you.
This budget decision also sought to address the underfunding of primarily female-dominated jobs. It doesn’t come as a shock that the caregiving industry has been consistently undervalued by our policy makers, despite the large physical and mental demands that come with working in the healthcare sector, living your life on-call to serve the most vulnerable. Ultimately, this mistreatment insults our public sector workers and is a large disappointment for Australian nurses, many of whom are women.
So here, we’re looking at paralysis inflicted, and induced. We’re seeing the NSW government’s consistent underfunding towards the public health sector, paralysing it into a state of total worker depletion and burnout. On top of that, we’re witnessing self-induced paralysis through the historic three-day doctor strikes this month — expressing their justified concerns in the only way the NSW government listens to. Ultimately, this condition needs immediate treatment.
