News

THE GOOD AND THE BAD

Yesterday the Victorian Government handed down its budget for the 2025/26 financial year.

The budget includes increased investment in the health care system including:

• $9.3 billion in hospital funding including new or redeveloped hospitals at Footscray, Frankston, and Maryborough hospitals.
• New community hospitals at Craigieburn, Cranbourne, and Phillip Island.
• Expansion of facilities at Wodonga, University Hospital Geelong and Swan Hill Emergency Department.
• $437 million to increase the size of the Victorian Virtual ED.
• $167 million for additional call-takers and dispatchers at Triple Zero Victoria.
• $84 million to upgrade Mansfield, Cobram, Yarrawonga and Korumburra to 24-hour resourcing and for Peak Period Units in rural Victoria

The VAU welcomes additional spending in the healthcare system. In particular we are pleased to see continued investment in urgent care clinics. Free and fast access to primary care is a key missing element of our healthcare system and results in enormous spillover of patients into emergency departments and ambulance services around Australia.

However, we are disappointed that long overdue election commitments for our Non-Emergency Patient Transport members have not been delivered in this budget.

In 2022, the VAU lobbied the Victorian Government regarding improvements for our NEPT members who play a vital role in transporting patients and freeing up paramedics to respond to emergencies.

Our priority requests were:

1. To have private NEPT contractors added to the Victorian portable long service leave scheme so that members could maintain LSL accrual when moving between employers during contract changes.
2. For NEPT to be covered by a ‘no less favorable’ mechanism which protects against private contractors undercutting each other on staff wages. This framework exists in other industries in Victoria like school cleaning and security.

In private sector enterprise bargaining, employers attempt to undercut each other by reducing their labor costs. Through several rounds of EBA negotiations, the union has had to fight hard to protect against actual wage cuts or attempts to deny any annual wage increase for NEPT members.

In 2022, the VAU received commitments from the Victorian Government to strengthen the NEPT sector, improve working conditions for Patient Transport Officers and Ambulance Transport Attendants by reducing casualization, standardising pay and enabling portability of entitlements across employers. The Government also committed to a review into the outsourcing of NEPT to private contractors with a view to bringing patient transport back into AV.

That review ran throughout 2023 and made several positive recommendations to improve the sector for both patients and staff. This included splitting planned and unplanned patient transport into two streams with unplanned coming back into AV with an expanded patient transport capability, centralising contract negotiations with health services and dispatch of planned NEPT cases, reducing casualisation and other initiatives to improve working conditions across the industry

Two years after the review, our members and the industry are still awaiting answers, and there has been no investment or improvements to NEPT in the budget.

In subsequent discussions the Government assures us that they are still committed to improving NEPT. We have advised the Government that we see this as a broken promise to our PTO and ATA members and one we won’t forget.

The VAU will continue to advocate for portable long service leave, bargaining protections, and industry reform. We will be meeting with the Premier and Minister in the coming weeks.

This means that we must continue to pursue improvements at the bargaining table with individual employers. We are currently at the bargaining table with RFDS and Health Select and we strongly encourage members from those companies to review the bargaining bulletins and complete the bargaining nomination form so that we can prepare for industrial action, as clearly its the only way we are going to improve your wages and conditions.