Transcript of media conference with Tim Jacobson, HACSU State Secretary; Thirza White, CPSU Tas General Secretary; Mandy Taylor, Child Safety Officer, at St Johns Park, New Town, 17 August 2022. They spoke following a stop work meeting of community services workers at the same location.
Tim Jacobson
What DCT members resolved today is two things. One is that they oppose the decision of this government to transfer them to the Department of Education, because they believe it will be a disastrous move. Secondly, they have resolved that in the event that they’re not consulted properly about the reason why, they will embark on a process of industrial action, which will take place over the next week or so.
Journalist – unidentified
Have DCT employees been given any kind of explanation as to the rationale?
Tim Jacobson
We’ve been asking since the previous Premier made this decision. And workers have been asking the same question, why the Department refuse to answer that question, because they don’t know themselves. The best we’ve been able to ascertain comes out of the media release that Premier Gutwein released on the day that he made the decision. And that’s it.
Journalist – Elliott
(inaudible)
Tim Jacobson
We’ve written to the department, the government, the Premier, on a number of occasions around this matter. We met with him last week and asked the same question again. And no comprehensive response was forthcoming.
Journalist – unidentified
Can you outline the difference between the $2,000 that’s being offered to nurses and what’s been offered to these staff?
Tim Jacobson
Well, one of the terrible things about the announcement that the government made yesterday was that health workers – and human service workers more broadly – had asked for in their current log of claims and incentive payment to be paid to them as well. They’ve all put in the hard yards over COVID. And they should be recognised for that. The $2,000 offer that the government made yesterday basically says this is full and final settlement of that claim that you made, which means that our Human Services members, members in child safety and youth justice, won’t get it. That’s an appalling position to put.
Journalist – Elliott
So HACSU and ANMF and other unions representing health workers, if they were to accept that, that payment for health workers, it would…all action across every sector has to stop. Is that how it’s playing out?
Tim Jacobson
There is a significant amount of confusion based on the letter that we received yesterday as to what the government’s saying around industrial action. These workers have just embarked on a process of negotiating a new agreement. They haven’t started taking industrial action yet. The government saying that this settles a component of their claim, and they want us to not take industrial action or not take further industrial action, well we haven’t even started. I don’t even know what they’re talking about. The letter itself raises more questions than it gives answers.
Journalist – unidentified
Should workers in these industries receive a similar retention bonus given the staffing issue?
Tim Jacobson
There’s absolutely no doubt, regardless of where you work in our human services system, that over the last two years it has been a terrible work arrangement. Understaffing, COVID, restrictions, and a whole lot of access issues have been placed on all workers, not just hospital workers, and everyone should be rewarded for that. The unfortunate thing is that the government made an announcement yesterday, that could have been good news. But he’s undermined his own delivery; the reality is that it has a sting in the tail that he didn’t tell people about. And unfortunately, now we’re going to have to work that through.
Journalist – unidentified
Ball park numbers: how many workers are being asked to accept nurses or that group of staff getting $2,000 as some sort of compensation for them?
Tim Jacobson
Well, the government’s own figures yesterday, and I’m not able to confirm that or not, but are in the order of around about 9000 workers will receive that payment. But the thing to understand is that this $2,000 payment will be offset against another payment, that workers are due to be paid today. That’s the escalation allowance for working in our hospitals. So if you receive $1,900, for working in a level three hospital, you’ll get as a result of the government’s announcement $100.
Journalist – unidentified
Given the (inaudible) to keep coming back, is the government kind of gaming people ‘oh, I’m only owed $600 at the moment, that’s $1400 profit’. And neglecting the potential money they might be earning in the future?
Tim Jacobson
Another issue is that what the government’s asked us to do is to withdraw from an agreement that it will in the future pay workers, where they work in a level three or level four hospital environment, from receiving an escalation allowance. So trading that off forever. Now, I’m not a rocket scientist, but I don’t know when and if there will be another outbreak, whether there’ll be another strain. But what the government’s saying is that this $2,000 is all you’re going to get now and into the future, because we want you to give up something that you might give in the future as a trade off for it.
Tasmanian Times
You’ve been around the state last few days having these kinds of meetings, how would you describe the morale of the workers that you’ve been speaking to?
Tim Jacobson
Well we made this point to the Premier last week, in relation to a number of things that are happening at the moment. And that is workers are exhausted. They’re angry. They’ve had enough. And unfortunately, yesterday’s announcement will be seen as trickiness. Yeah, it’s a tricky announcement. It’s not how it was presented. And what could have been good news for this Premier will turn into bad news. And it won’t be something that he’ll be able to deliver quickly.
Journalist – Elliott
(inaudible)
Tim Jacobson
There, there are around about 10,000 people who will miss out on this retention allowance, which we claimed in our bargain, because the government asked us to accept what they put as full and final settlement of that offer. No-one wants to take industrial action. But there is a point when workers feel that they’re not being listened to. The circumstances today are a clear example of that, where not only is the government not listening, they’ve told the workers themselves not to bother asking the questions, because the department can’t answer them either. There is a point when they’ve had enough. Two years of COVID. Two years of under-staffing, we we’ve got staffing issues here like we’ve never seen before. People are under extraordinary pressure. And they’ve had enough. People need to act sometimes to make change. And that’s what those workers are doing today.
Tasmanian Times
At this point do you have another meeting scheduled with the government?
Tim Jacobson
We have no more meetings scheduled with the government over the short term. We do apparently have a meeting sometime early next week to talk about the offer that the government’s made. There are discussions next week around the transfer of DCT. But I don’t accept and I don’t think we’ll get any serious answers to our questions at those meetings.
Journalist – Elliott
Is that meeting with the government?
Tim Jacobson
It’s a meeting with the department next week, but not with the Premier. No, there’s no more. There are no more meetings scheduled with the Premier in the short term, we’d obviously be keen to sit down again, and work through the issues, again that we worked through last week. But, you know, the government has embarked on a course of action. If that’s their course of action, they’ll just simply have to live with the consequences of that.
Thirza White
I don’t think workers in child safety feel valued at all. They’ve had a really clear message for the Premier for months, if not years now, that they need support in making sure that the required staff are in place and able to deliver services to vulnerable children and he just refuses to listen. Right now we know there are 200 kids that are unallocated to a child safety officer. And I understand that there’s 500 kids that are allocated in the advisor referral line, that’s almost like 700 children that are waiting outside child safety, ramped, waiting for support. It’s not okay.
Journalist – Elliott
And you’ve made numerous attempts to raise your concerns, (inaudible)
Thirza White
At this point, we’ve had inquiries, we’ve had reports, we’ve written we’ve taken industrial action, we’ve asked politely, we’ve asked not so politely, and yet the Premier still refuses. At this point, it’s actually all on Premier Rockliff, he needs to intervene and deliver a Workforce Strategy for child safety. And the fact that he isn’t means that every word that he has uttered following the Commission of Inquiry around child safety is hollow and means nothing.
Journalist – unidentified
What would a workforce strategy look like, from your perspective?
Thirza White
We need incentives to recruit and to retain workers. The reality is you can go and get a much easier job in the not for profit sector for more money, it’s likely to be permanent. And so we need to see competitive pay, we need to see improved careers, we need to make sure students are given permanent jobs. And we need incentives to get people to take up jobs in the north-west and other hard-to-staff roles. We have practical solutions. What we don’t have is a Premier that is willing to listen to his workforce.
Journalist – unidentified
And you’re not planning on giving up the stop work action and (inaudible)
Thirza White
Right now, 70% of the north-west positions are not filled. You know, this is a question. It would be irresponsible for us to give up stop work action, because unless we take this action, I cannot see that we will get the action we need to keep at-risk kids safe. You know, 97% of child safety workers have said that they will take action and they don’t want to do that. This is not taken lightly. But the reality is that we need a Premier who is willing to step in and take the action needed.
Journalist – unidentified
Will there be any impact on service delivery during that?
Thirza White
There’s impact on service delivery now. There are hundreds of children who are not allocated to a child safety officer. And there are there are vacancies year on year on. This is not a new issue. This is a long term issue. So any kind of talk about service delivery being impacted is just really unfair to workers, because actually service delivery is impacted every day by our government’s decision not to fund and not to provide the necessary incentives to ensure that we have the required staff.
Journalist – unidentified
Have you seen this before where governments asked one group of workers to feel kind of placated by another group of workers getting an incentive?
Thirza White
I think everyone knows that workers in hospitals have been on the frontline of COVID for the last you know, for really long time, but actually, I think what’s really disappointing about the Premier’s commitment yesterday is it doesn’t acknowledge that there are other groups that have also been on the frontline. You know, for example, biosecurity workers for the first two years of the pandemic, you know, were in quarantine, had to spend time away from their families, and also wore full PPE, and we haven’t seen them recognised We would have liked to see a larger group included in this allowance. But it also has more holes in Swiss cheese.
What we see is a good idea that is actually going to fail in the way that it’s been executed from the Premier. And that’s largely because he, we just have this situation where he refuses to sit down and talk to unions and to his workforce. So what we’ve got right now is an allowance that will be given, but something will be taken away. And it’s not just going to be taken away for health workers, it’ll actually be taken away for prison officers who don’t get the allowance. So this is a really poorly designed solution to a problem. And again, what we need is just a government that will sit down and listen to its workforce and work together.
Mandy Taylor
I’m Mandy Taylor, Child Safety Officer out-of-home care. And HACSU delegate.
I’d just like to say that workers who stay here are really passionate about the work that we do. We obviously don’t want to take industrial action. However, we’re working with the most vulnerable children and families who don’t have a voice unless we have a voice for them. I suppose that’s the point I want to make. In out of home care, for example, I know that I go home at night, and I don’t feel that I’ve done everything I could for my carers; my caseload makes it impossible to support my carers on a regular basis. And my carers are the crux of child safety, because they help our children to heal. And that’s what we’re missing.
Journalist – unidentified
What effect does it have on you to know that every day you’re doing as much as you can and it’s not enough?
Mandy Taylor
It has an impact on all workers that I work with. Every day, I have workers as a delegate come to me and talk about the impact it has on them. You know, sometimes you lose sleep over it, you think about cases or things that have happened, things that have happened to children, and worry about that. And it does change your view on life experiences. But you know, the positive thing is that you feel why I came into this work is to make a difference. So if you can make a difference everyday, that’s how to continue to come work.
Journalist – unidentified
When you say that changes your view on life experiences, what do you mean?
Mandy Taylor
We have built a world view on things, and it becomes a little bit skewed. So you sometimes don’t trust people or, you know, you judge people, you might look at people in the street and wonder, you know, have you done something to your child or, you know, do you those kinds of things. That’s a whole another conversation.
Journalist – Elliott
Do you think the children have noticed a change in terms of the morale of the staff?
Mandy Taylor
I think what I can speak from carers, and some children who I see through the carers feel a little bit neglected, they don’t feel that they’re getting the support they need. I know that a lot of response from children who have been in care is that they don’t get to have a relationship when they’re continually changing workers. And they don’t understand all the time why they’re in care. So when a worker doesn’t build up the relationship either with a carer or children, it’s hard to have that relationship, that that trusting relationship that someone cares about them.
Journalist – Elliott
Are you watching the Commission of Inquiry and (inaudible)
Mandy Taylor
I have watched some of it, but I find it for myself I find that quite traumatic as well. Why are you working in the area to be all over that.
Journalist – unidentified
Are some of your colleagues thinking about maybe not continuing?
Mandy Taylor
I can’t talk for my colleagues and what they tend to do. I can say that it’s becoming increasingly difficult. And I know that a lot of people that I know and work with over the years have left.
Journalist – Elliott
The government announced the other day measures to get paid placement for social work students to encourage them to get (inaudible). Would you suggest a student does continue a career child safety? Or is it just not (inaudible)
Mandy Taylor
I came to child safety as a mature age student through uni so my placement was not paid. But that was not my motivation to work in child safety. I wanted to work there. So it didn’t matter whether I was paid or not.
Journalist – Elliott
And if someone did say they are considering a job in child safety, what would you tell them?
Mandy Taylor
I’d be really open and honest about what the work involves.
Journalist – unidentified
How did you feel about that announcement that nurses are going to get to $2,000 but it didn’t include some of the staff?
Mandy Taylor
If the motivation was about not taking industrial action, I didn’t see the sense. I don’t think that should make you not take action when there’s your need to when there’s something that needs to be addressed. I do just think the nurses deserve a payment for everything, but so do so many other people who’ve gone through COVID. And the you know, the conditions with that it’s been really hard.
Journalist – Elliott
And the restructuring of departments is adding a lot of stress?
Mandy Taylor
It’s the unknown. It’s the not knowing how it’s going to impact where we where we sit, our pay structure that’s another bit of it. So yeah, it’s all the little details that were unsure of.
Journalist – unidentified
Could you give an example of the kind of work that has been made harder because there’s this lack of staff?
Mandy Taylor
The kind of work is the visits to children and carers that we’re not doing on a regular basis. So that absolutely impacts.
Editor’s note: the microphone of the recording device was as usual pointed toward the speakers. Due to the (intentionally) limited directionality, journalists who stand behind the microphone and much further away are usually not recorded well.
Anita Dow MP, Shadow Health Minister, 17 August 2022
Health workers bonus payment not nearly enough
The Rockliff government’s offer of a $2,000 bonus payment to health workers is nowhere near enough to ease the load on exhausted health workers and stop them from leaving the profession.
While the bonus payment appears on the face of it to be a good first step, significant concerns remain about the conditions the Liberal government has tied to it, after they had to be dragged kicking and screaming to provide anything at all, then offering $1,000 less than the bonus provided to health workers in Victoria and NSW.
Unions are concerned that part-time health workers will miss out on the bonus payment, and that the $2,000 is contingent on the government doing away with escalation bonus payments and health care workers ceasing strike action.
Not only that, but this government’s stubborn refusal to budge on its 2.5 per cent wages policy will do nothing to address chronic staff shortages or convince health workers on the brink to stay in the profession.
Industrial action continues across the state nurses at the North West Regional Hospital are walking off the job today and other public sector workers including paramedics are also planning industrial action.
While the Premier and part-time Health Minister Jeremy Rockliff struggles to get the basics right across virtually the entire public service, Tasmania’s health system remains in crisis, with huge numbers of vacant nursing positions, and massive waiting lists for elective surgery and specialist appointments.
As an ED nurse at the Royal Hobart Hospital who wrote to Mr Rockliff said, “our department is stretched so beyond our limitations that it is quite frankly a dangerous and terrifying place to work”.
Mr Rockliff needs to do much more to recruit and retain staff – and our stressed and overworked health workers deserve real recognition and tangible action so they can stay in Tasmania rather than moving interstate to seek better pay and conditions.
David O’Byrne MP, Member for Franklin, 17 August 2022
Premier’s cynical Covid Retention Payment has more strings attached than a Symphony Orchestra
The Premier’s cynical Covid Bonus for health workers has more strings attached than the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra, as details emerged overnight around the long list of caveats attached to the payment.
Franklin MP David O’Byrne pressed the Premier in Question Time today on why the Covid bonus payment announced yesterday is tied to scrapping the existing Covid escalation payments, ceasing industrial action and accepting the government’s new workforce package.
“This Covid bonus payment was supposed to be a genuine gesture of thanks to health workers on behalf of the Tasmanian People. But instead, the government have cynically designed it to be a negotiation point to remove other entitlements and ban industrial action,” said Mr O’Byrne.
“The Covid bonus payment yesterday would be reduced by all the money workers have so far received under Covid escalation allowances. This escalation allowance was separate and specific entitlement, agreed to be paid for a very different purpose.
“Any goodwill with health workers the Premier thinks he has restored is now gone.”
Only two weeks earlier, the Premier announced a ‘return-to-work’ bonus which was roundly criticized for ignoring current staff who are keeping our ailing health system afloat.
“This payment is not the genuine gesture of goodwill the Premier claims it is. It is a cynical negotiation tactic announced weeks after nurses and midwives were forced to strike just to have the government listen to their concerns,” said Mr O’Byrne.
