Nurses attack premier’s ‘offensive’ stance on pay after police win big

The NSW government has become engulfed in a wages battle on multiple fronts as nurses prepare to embark on a statewide 24-hour strike furious at an offer well below a $700 million deal struck with police.

With nurses striking from their first shift on Wednesday, hospitals were bracing for extensive emergency department wait times and the postponement of up to 700 planned surgeries. Anger with the government escalated after police were offered a deal that would increase some pay packets by up to 39.4 per cent over four years.

Striking nurses march to NSW parliament in September. Credit: Janie Barrett

The government is also locked in disputes with other public-sector unions, but says it has managed to stave off the threat of a rail strike on Thursday that would have ground the city’s train network to a halt. Premier Chris Minns warned the solution was only a temporary fix.

As Minns celebrated the government’s long-negotiated wages offer for police, he was making his most explicit case to nurses their demands would not be met, arguing granting their $1 billion pre-election demands for safe staffing levels would ultimately come at the cost of salaries.

The NSW Nurses and Midwives’ Association general secretary Shaye Candish took umbrage with the idea that improving staffing levels in hospitals should be traded off against improved wages for nurses, saying the government “cannot ignore the reality of our healthcare crisis or evade its responsibility to fix it”.

“That nurses and midwives should have to pay through lower wages in order to ensure safe staffing levels is offensive,” she said.

“Why does a female-dominated workforce have to trade safe staffing for wages? NSW already has the lowest ratio of registered nurses to population anywhere in the country, and we are the lowest paid on average. How does the government expect to fix this problem with trading between the two?”

The union wants a 15 per cent first-year pay rise but on Tuesday Minns ruled out budging from his 10.5 per cent offer for the state’s nearly 50,000 nurses unless cuts are found elsewhere.

Minns said he would not improve the offer unless savings could be found, saying police traded in their bloated death and disability insurance scheme for higher wages.

NSW Premier Chris Minns says nurses made a “choice” between safe staffing levels and major salary increases.Credit: Janie Barrett

“We do have to make that choice. And in fairness to the government, that’s what other unions have done, and have sat down with us, worked out priorities, worked out what was important,” he said.

“The [NSW Nurses and Midwives’ Association] has not been prepared to make changes the way other unions in NSW have, and as a result, we’ve got less to play with.”

The union had argued for increased expenditure on health, Candish said, but had proposed a range of measures that could “improve patient care and generate cost efficiencies”.

“We are prepared to work with the government ... but we are not going to be complicit in undermining the conditions of overworked nurses and midwives, or the public health system of NSW,” she said.

The NSW Police Association is recommending members accept the offer of 22.3 per cent to 39.4 per cent over four years for non-commissioned officers and between 20.5 per cent and 27.1 per cent for commissioned officers when it comes to a vote next Monday.

The near-$700 million offer was feasible because it would be offset through savings found in the Police Blue Ribbon Insurance Scheme (PBRI), Minns said. The savings would be recouped “very quickly” because of the scheme’s rapid growth, he said, noting the cost of the PBRI had risen from $335 million in 2018 to $700 million this year.

The nurses’ demand for 15 per cent would take them “well north” of other jurisdictions, Minns said, while Treasurer Daniel Mookhey said estimates of the quantum of the nurses’ wage demands was almost $6 billion.

Minns said progress was being made on staffing ratios, which are yet to be fixed, but would take longer than the 12 months desired by the union. The government was prepared to take the wage dispute to the state’s industrial court if necessary, he said.

“We’ve made progress with recruitment. We’ve made progress with retention. We’ve offered significantly more than the previous government,” he said.

Shadow Liberal health spokeswoman Kellie Sloane accused the government of playing “pick your favourite child” when it came to public sector workers and wage increases.

Greens health spokesperson Amanda Cohn questioned why the rationale for offering police a historic pay rise – addressing haemorrhaging staff numbers – was not being applied to nurses and midwives given they were “leaving the state in droves”.

“The premier blaming the cost of safe staffing levels to justify not paying nurses and midwives a fair wage is offensive because the vast majority of the workforce across the state have not felt any impact from those changes,” she said.

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