Page 2092 - Week 07 - Thursday, 20 August 2020
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If you are working 12 hours on and you do not get your two statutory half-hour breaks and then you work seven days, you are a bit of a basket case at the end of it. I am hearing from people like that that, at the same time, it is increasingly difficult for them to be paid their salary that they are supposed to be paid and their overtime and that if they do not get that break, they are entitled to overtime and they are not getting their overtime.
In addition to that, I am hearing from junior doctors who work in Canberra Health Services, not at Calvary, about the problems that they are having in relation to their payroll. First it was a small number of doctors, but I have become aware that this is a wide-scale problem. What we are seeing is that junior doctors say to me that they are rostered on for long hours anyhow and then they might do 10 or 20, or even 30 hours extra time in the week; and for every one of those hours, they have to sit down and apply electronically online for overtime, accounting in 15-minute blocks for what they have done in that time.
That does not happen to Calvary doctors because they have a much simpler system for accounting for the hours that people work. This is not a problem across both hospitals. It is a problem for Canberra Health Services.
I took the opportunity of this motion, where we were saying that we really appreciate health workers, to bring to the attention of the Assembly the significant gaps that we have in relation to what we say and what we do. In doing that, I draw to the Assembly’s attention the problems that we have and how they have not been addressed by this Labor-Greens government.
We have seen that the safety and security of health workers continues to be under serious threat under this government. We have seen our health workers having to go to work around infrastructure and equipment failures under this government. We have seen our health workers having to fill gaps and work ridiculous hours simply because this Labor-Greens government cannot attract people to come to the ACT and work in the health system and retain them. They cannot attract them to come here because, as employers, their reputation is appalling.
If you hire 100 junior doctors a year and then you do not pay them according to their entitlements and they have to constantly run after their back pay and their overtime pay, what are they going to do? Are they going to settle in Canberra and say, “This is a great place to work”? No; they are going to take the first opportunity they can to get out of working in the ACT health system and they will tell their friends not to bother to come. When they become senior specialists, they will not take up opportunities to come and work in the ACT because they remember how badly treated they were when they were junior doctors.
Now we are seeing under the Labor-Greens government health workers who are not being paid properly; and this is not a surprise to the minister. I heard some of the minister’s comments at lunchtime. She was sounding very flustered and somewhat surprised by these revelations and then tried to say, “But we are doing so much about it.” This minister, before she was the Minister for Health, was the minister for the
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