PM’s failure to invest in medical training has hurt us

’Across the nation, our hospitals, aged-care facilities, community health centres and local medical practices are crying out for medical staff.’

The federal election campaign has shone a long overdue spotlight on Australia’s severe shortage of nurses and doctors.

Across the nation, our hospitals, aged-care facilities, community health centres and local medical practices are crying out for medical staff. Visit any public hospital in the country today and you’ll hear a lot of different accents. While the services of these caring workers are welcome and very much appreciated, it shouldn’t have to be like this.

We should be training up Australians to meet our medical workforce needs. The same goes for other caring roles such as aged-care workers and child carers. That’s why a Labor government will deliver 465,000 fee-free TAFE places and 20,000 new university places in areas of workforce need.

We’ll train up the next generation of nurses and carers to ensure Australia has the health workforce it needs. In doing so we will give thousands of Australians the skills they will need to find good, secure jobs and fulfilling careers. And we’ll support and fund higher pay for aged-care workers.

Earlier in the campaign, I announced Labor’s plan to establish 50 emergency medical clinics where patients with non-life-threatening medical problems will be able to receive bulk-billed care. Under the plan, existing medical practices and community health services will be able to bid for the extra funding to offer the new emergency services, which would operate seven days a week from 8am to 10pm.

Scott Morrison opposes the plan, although he has no alternative. He argues there will not be enough doctors and nurses to staff the new centres.

The government offers the same criticism over Labor’s plan to improve the quality of aged care by requiring every nursing home in the nation to have a registered nurse on duty around the clock. Morrison’s critique is a condemnation of his own failures on medical workforce development.

The Coalition has cut funding to universities and TAFE colleges when the nation’s medical needs are increasing due to the ageing of the population. It abolished the Prevocational General Practice Placements Program, which played a crucial role in training the next generation of GPs. It also has stopped funding research into the nation’s medical workforce needs.

In 2009 Labor established a federal body to plan and address health workforce challenges – Health Workforce Australia. In 2014, HWA warned that Australia faced a shortfall of 85,000 nurses by 2025 and 123,000 nurses by 2030.

Instead of acting on this advice and investing to meet the projected shortfall, the Coalition government abolished HWA. Since then, it has failed to come up with a new method for planning for nursing workforce growth and also has cut funding to the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare for its workforce research.

A Labor government is ready to rebuild the nation’s medical workforce after nearly a decade of negligence. We understand that our ageing population demands a new emphasis on medical and caring skills and we will deliver the resources to make sure those skills are taught. That won’t end the immediate shortfalls. In the short term we must recruit more overseas doctors and nurses. But this is a stopgap measure.

It is extraordinary that the current government is unwilling to invest in Australia’s greatest resource: our people. One of the great lessons from the pandemic is that we need to stand on our own two feet and end overreliance on other nations for everything from medicines to medical personnel. Just as we must make our own mRNA vaccines and personal protective equipment, we must also train our own doctors and nurses.

In the past, state governments have asked the commonwealth for help to deal with the financial burdens that come with delivering health services to an ageing population. Morrison has refused. As on so many issues, his response to a serious problem is to claim it isn’t his job. But national leadership is about working with other levels of government to address challenges that face our nation.

It is not acceptable that vulnerable elderly Australians are living in a federally run aged-care system that a royal commission has described as a national disgrace. Nor is it acceptable to allow this disgrace to continue because the Liberals have wilfully failed to invest in adequate medical workforce training.

To Morrison, these problems are acceptable because fixing them requires investment. But government is about choices. We can choose to invest in our own self-reliance, just as we can choose to invest in the skills of our own people, which boosts productivity and therefore generates economic growth. We can choose to end Morrison’s waste, such as the $5.5bn squandered on the ill-fated French submarine contract, and instead invest in our health system and skills training.

A Labor government will prioritise investment that makes a real difference to the way Australians live. That includes making it easier to see a doctor and making sure our nurses, the heroes of the pandemic, get the support they need to do what they do best: care for other Australians.

Anthony Albanese is the leader of the Australian Labor Party.