Mental health workers versus Victorian Labor

The public mental health system in Victoria is a disaster. Mental health workers across the state are demanding that the state government fix it. In the past week, allied health and nurse members of the Health and Community Services Union (HACSU) struck and rallied outside state parliament during a statewide day of action, to insist that the ALP address the sector’s underfunding.

Successive ALP governments have created a severely understaffed, degrading and dangerous mental health system. Low wages, disgusting conditions and burnout are the daily reality for workers. People seeking care and treatment confront an exhausting and too often traumatic battle to receive grossly inadequate support that is overly medicalised and demeaning. The 2019 Royal Commission into Mental Health in Victoria confirmed as much and recommended broad reforms.

In response, the ALP in 2022 promised an additional 800 full-time positions in the public mental health sector. In reality, at least 2,000 additional workers are needed. The government has since backflipped.

The latest offer proposes cuts to pay for allied health workers and no increase to overall staffing. It is attempting to divide the workforce by giving a long-overdue pay rise to mental health nurses, while cutting paid entitlements and offering a pathetic pay rise of 3 percent to long underpaid, overwhelmingly women workers. The offer proposes to cut a yearly retention payment and slash some penalty rates, which, taken together, would result in an overall pay cut for allied health workers.

General nurses in Victoria won a 28.4 percent pay rise last year, after union members rejected a government offer of a 3 percent annual pay rise. When mental health nurses, who have the same qualifications and training as general nurses, but are employed under different enterprise agreements, demanded the pay rise awarded to general nurses, the ALP initially suggested it would not extend pay parity. It has since backed down and agreed. The catch is that allied health workers are being thrown under the bus.

Either nurses or allied health workers can staff many roles in the public mental health system. The offer from the ALP would result in nurses, in some instances, being paid $40,000 more than allied health workers for doing exactly the same job. In a recent poll conducted by HACSU, 97 percent of respondents said they would leave the public mental health sector if the government did not pay them more, and fairly.

There is enormous and cumulative anger and disillusionment among mental health workers across Victoria. Decades ago, workers, including senior clinicians, regularly talked about “a crisis in mental health”. The ALP has been in government for more than a decade and turned the crisis into a full-blown disaster. The Allan government would have us believe there is no money and that hospitals have to cut budgets.

The lie that Australian governments have no money to provide high-quality public health services is becoming an increasingly enraging and hollow cliché. Australia is one of the wealthiest countries in the world.

Healthcare workers are getting angrier and more determined to take on the Labor government’s destruction of our public services. The more it refuses to fix them, the harder we should fight.

HACSU members want genuine pay increases for allied health members, pay parity with nursing colleagues and no cuts to current entitlements. The enterprise bargaining campaign continues and should accept no less. The ALP, meanwhile, should deliver much more.