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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 12 Hansard (5 December) . . Page.. 3625 ..

MR MOORE (continuing):

relations and on the other hand that we take care about the expenditure of community money. What we are interested in doing here is ensuring that, while we look after our nurses and make sure that they have a positive attitude, they can see that we, representing the community, also have a positive attitude to nursing and will ensure that we do what we can to look after them.

Mr Berry: Ask Bill the bursar basher!

MR MOORE: This is Mr Berry. You may recall what happened when he was health minister, not only with the doctors but the nurses and so on, and how much industrial strife occurred and anybody at all who was under Mr Berry's responsibility had at some stage or other basically gone out to industrial action.

Of course there will be some small elements of industrial action when we have a difference of opinion with unions, which we will seek to work through. Mr Berry, you would have enjoyed being in the meeting I had with the ANF yesterday. I have to say that the package was in one sense a surprise to them, as Ms Duff said on radio. It was not a surprise in the sense that they had been looking for this sort of reaction from government for some time, but there was surprise at the fact that we intervened in the middle of an industrial agreement period and said, "We don't need to do this; we want to do this because we can see some issues that are coming up."

What are those issues that we could see coming up? Our nurses were potentially falling behind nurses in Victoria and New South Wales.

Mr Stanhope: We know what's coming up - a minister for health with a low approval rating in an election period.

MR SPEAKER: I will tell you what's coming up if you keep interjecting, Mr Stanhope.

MR MOORE: Mr Speaker, I might remind you that you warned him a couple of times last week. I wonder how many times you need to do it.

MR SPEAKER: I warn you, Mr Stanhope, now.

MR MOORE: Because we are keen to ensure that we get the best outcomes for our patients, we recognised that Victoria and New South Wales had made significant offers to their nurses after we had come to an agreement with our nurses. What that would mean is that our nurses over the next couple of years - certainly within the enterprise bargaining period - would fall substantially behind their counterparts in New South Wales and Victoria. We also recognise that there is a risk of a growing shortage of numbers in nursing. We also recognised that those shortages apply very specifically to particular areas of special need, and of course the package was specifically designed to deal with those areas.

But Mr Hird's specific question was: how has it been received? Mr Speaker, it has been extraordinarily well received, not just by the ANF but also by nurses themselves, who can see that the government does recognise the work that they do and is keen to ensure that we get a better work force, a better workplace and better outcomes for patients, because that is what the package is about.

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