Paramedics save Minns from a new year catastrophe
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Published December 14, 2023
Sydney Morning Herald, 14 December 2023
In the end, paramedics rescued Chris Minns from a real-time emergency but the NSW government will still end the year bruised and battered.
After the high of its ambitious housing plan last week, the NSW government will stagger into Christmas after shielding punches from party heavyweight and union boss Gerard Hayes, who has labelled the Minns regime everything from naive to “young Labor on steroids”.
The Health Services Union secretary’s jibes ring true to some extent. One of Labor’s signature policies at the March election was ending the Coalition’s 2.5 per cent wages cap to allow it to pay essential public sector workers – including nurses, teachers and paramedics – more.
But as the government’s protracted and messy negotiations with the teachers and now the paramedics have shown, scrapping the wages cap was the easy part. Brokering deals with a workforce that was promised a big pay bump is not so simple. It may have been naivety or inexperience, perhaps both. Nonetheless, Labor has learned some tough lessons along the way.
Hayes made it clear early on that he would not let the government off the hook. Just one month after Labor finally clawed its way back to government, Hayes publicly admonished Premier Chris Minns and his team for dragging their feet on promised wage negotiations with essential workers.
At the time, Hayes’ intervention did not bother the government. As the Coalition was sticking to its rhetoric that Labor existed solely to look after its “union mates”, some unkind words from a union boss allowed the government to bat away that argument.
But the ongoing argy-bargy stopped being a positive for the government. Instead, the battles, which have been brutal and bitter at times, have made NSW Labor look like it was prepared to go to war with essential workers rather than the union leaders.
The teachers’ pay dispute was the government’s first baptism of fire. After insisting that an agreement had been struck with Education Minister Prue Car and Treasurer Daniel Mookhey, the then Teachers’ Federation president Angelo Gavrielatos accused the government of an “act of betrayal” after reneging on the deal.
“Never before has a government walked away from a deal in the way that we are experiencing now,” a clearly furious Gavrielatos bellowed at the time. Eventually, after months of escalating tensions, the deadlock ended in September, and the teachers and the government reached a historic pay deal to give new graduates a $10,000 pay rise.
The government quietly concedes it handled negotiations with the teachers poorly, taking too long to come up with an acceptable offer. It seems the same can be said for the paramedics, a stoush which has been bubbling along for months but intensified in recent weeks.
Beaming from the release of its highly anticipated housing plan last week – its most ambitious policy to date – the Minns government was determined to cap off 2023 on a positive note. Instead, it rounded out the year in a fight with thousands of paramedics demanding their promised pay rise.
At least 2000 disillusioned paramedics were threatening not to renew their professional registration, which would have meant they were legally unable to attend triple zero calls from January 1. Given New Year’s Eve is the busiest night of the year for the ambulance service, that outcome could have been catastrophic.
As the clock was ticking towards the potential disaster, Hayes – a seasoned political operator – made it clear that Minns and Mookhey were the ones holding up the deal. He was, however, glowing in his praise of the Health Minister Ryan Park, who Hayes insists was doing everything he could to land an agreement.
As talks broke down, and the HSU stormed out of negotiations last week, the government took the significant step for a Labor administration and listed the matter before the Industrial Relations Commission. Then, on Monday, Minns weighed in on ABC Sydney radio and said he would meet Hayes “in a heartbeat” if it would bring an end to the impasse.
Hayes took him up on it, called Minns and the pair met in Parliament House that evening for a “good discussion”. Minns and Hayes were then in regular text contact and Hayes conceded it was the intervention of the premier that finally swung the talks. The IRC hearings were abandoned and the HSU membership agreed on Wednesday afternoon to the government’s wage offer of an average 25 per cent increase over four years. It will come with a $500 million price tag.
Each side blames the other for the drawn-out mess. Hayes pushed too hard and was not willing to accept the deal that he had originally requested. The government was too slow in coming up with an offer and misread the anger of the paramedics. In the end, the only person who emerged with clean hands was Park, who through this has quietly proven himself to be one of Minns’ best assets.
On Tuesday evening, an exhausted Park was half-heartedly celebrating the potential breakthrough over a drink with his team at an inner-city bar across the road from government headquarters. Park was meant to be in the Northern Hemisphere on holiday with his wife and children, but delayed his trip to see the pay deal through. After an estimated 20 meetings with Hayes over the course of six months, Park had earned his beer.