Who cares? Voters will if NSW nurses start quitting state of origin

Colette Duff is angry and ready to quit her job. Duff, a registered nurse with 30 years of experience, works in the emergency department of Sutherland Hospital. She drives a beaten-up, 14-year-old Toyota Corolla and earns less than $50 an hour.

What really irks Duff is that a first-year nurse north of the border earns more. “So you can walk out the door in Queensland, two weeks out of uni as a new grad, and get paid more than me,” she says.

Little wonder Duff is angry.

Colette Duff at the nurses’ protest outside State Parliament during their 24-hour strike on Wednesday.Credit: Flavio Brancaleone

NSW Labor had a powerful election promise in the lead-up to the 2023 state election. After a torrid few years when we asked the world of our frontline staff – most notably nurses who were forced to work long shifts in head-to-toe plastic as COVID-19 swept across the world – Labor promised better pay.

Voters did not begrudge this. In the final weeks of the campaign, a poll for the Herald by the Resolve Political Monitor found most voters believed public sector employees – nurses, but also teachers and emergency workers – deserved a pay rise above the then Coalition government’s 3 per cent wages cap, even with the added cost to the budget.

The Coalition, meanwhile, insisted that paying frontline workers more was unsustainable and would blow the budget. It was a risky argument to mount amid a cost-of-living crisis and on the back of a pandemic when there was widespread sympathy for low-paid nurses, teachers and paramedics. The Coalition ultimately could not convince voters that the budget trumped essential workers.

But in axing the wages cap, which many economists argued was too blunt an instrument, the Labor government has opened a Pandora’s Box of grievances where different branches of public sector workers eye off what each other get and, not surprisingly, demand the same. This is creating a divided and disgruntled public service. The scenes outside Macquarie Street on Wednesday left little doubt about that.

Nurses, including Duff (who is a union representative, so allowed to speak publicly), rallied outside Parliament House infuriated that their demands for a 15 per cent pay rise in the first year of the deal had not been met by the Labor government. Their strike action was already planned before the confirmation that NSW police would receive an unprecedented deal, increasing some pay packets by almost 40 cent over four years.

If anything was going to strengthen the nurses’ resolve to keep fighting for higher pay, it was that news. The NSW Nurses and Midwives’ Association general secretary, Shaye Candish, seized on what she saw as a gendered pay rise. “Why does a female-dominated workforce have to trade safe staffing for wages?” Candish asked. (Teachers, also a female-dominated sector, received a historic pay rise that gives new graduates a $10,000 increase. NSW teachers are now the highest paid in the country).

The safe staffing levels referred to by Candish are a sticking point. Central to the nurses’ demands before the election was a commitment from Labor that they would improve patient-to-nurse ratios. Labor agreed, and insists it is working towards that.

At the same time, Premier Chris Minns has ruled out budging from his 10.5 per cent offer for the state’s almost 50,000 nurses unless cuts are found elsewhere. The police agreed to cut back their bloated death-and-disability scheme, which will allow those savings to be redirected to wages. Nurses will need to find similar savings before Minns caves.

The nurses are not prepared to back down and more strike action is likely. This risks creating longer waiting times for elective surgery and more logjams in emergency departments.

The nurses, however, are not without fault in this battle. As a circuit breaker, NSW Health agreed to an interim 3 per cent pay rise for nurses, backdated to July 1. The understanding was that no strike action would take place while the government and union thrashed out a final agreement. But the nurses did not keep up their side of the deal, prompting the president of the NSW Industrial Relations Commission to describe Wednesday’s industrial action as “a failure by a major industrial party to abide by a commitment given to this commission”.

“It will cost nurses pay and cause inconvenience and worse to patients and their families,” the independent umpire said.

Duff was willing to swallow that lost pay – she says she has been underpaid her whole career – and is determined to keep fighting for safer staffing levels and better wages. It cannot be a choice between the two, the 52-year-old says.

Voters are likely to still be on the side of nurses. And this presents a political conundrum for the government. A Labor government needs to be the champion of frontline workers and must also balance a budget. After all, less than two years ago, it promised the electorate to do both.

Alexandra Smith is state political editor.