Page 2093 - Week 07 - Thursday, 20 August 2020
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secure jobs code in the ACT, making sure that people were not underpaid. This is the minister who instituted the secure jobs code, who became the health minister and has been lobbied about the pay system for the doctors. Basically, from day one she has known about this but she has done nothing about it.
Young doctors who are working up to 90 hours a week often do not get their pay for weeks after they have earned their pay. They have to chase up the pay system. They say to me that this is not a criticism of the pay clerks who are under just as much stress as they are, it is a symptom of the outmoded system that the government has imposed upon them and is not doing anything about.
There is considerable evidence, but I will leave the evidence of what I understand—I have seen that the minister is going to move an amendment which I find, frankly, fairly concerning—to talk about further when she has moved her amendment.
I think that what we need to do is recognise that the stories of the junior doctors and other workers are real and they are matters of concern. I also have to say, in all fairness, I think that it is a failure of representation of the industrial organisations who represent junior doctors and other health workers if this system has been going on for as long as I understand it has been and it has been unaddressed.
Just one of the issues that came about, and that I became aware of, is material that was circulated on a junior doctors forum where one of the junior doctors did an audit of some of the wage records of some of that doctor’s colleagues over a three-month period. The recent audit was of 27 health workers and it found that thousands of dollars were owed to those 27 health workers. There were also instances of overpayments having been made but, for the most part, they were underpaid.
Of course, the problem is that the system is not automated. You would think that in a city like Canberra, a first-world city in the 21st century, that the pay system of the hospital would be automated. It is not and herein lies the problem. The administrative processes are so complicated and so bureaucratic that the already stretched junior doctors, who have already clocked up 80 or 90 hours a week, have to then sit down and manually claim each extra quarter hour of overtime. Then the overstretched pay clerks have to manually process that after somebody gives them approval. The processes involved in this and the auditing and the checking of this actually add to the cost.
The health minister, as I have said, has known about this for some time and she has been complacent. At the very best, she has been complacent. I think that that is absolutely and utterly abhorrent. I note that the minister is proposing to remove two paragraphs from my motion that talk about the poor conditions and the call for an audit. I think that what that does is confirm for the people of the ACT, for the young doctors, for the other health workers who are trying to just get a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work, that this minister is complicit and colluding in wage theft in the ACT health system.
While this minister is complicit in wage theft in the ACT health system, her words of support and thanks for frontline health workers sound pretty shallow because, as I said
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