Venu Menon
Wellington, August 8,2023
The government will meet the additional expenditure accruing from the pay increase for nurses from a contingency fund set aside in Budget 2023, Prime Minister Chris Hipkins said.
Addressing the media following the Cabinet meeting on Monday, Hipkins acknowledged that “the nurses extracted a good pay deal.”
Minister of Health Dr Ayesha Verrall, who accompanied the prime minister at the media briefing, said the “new settlement of the collective agreement was from within Te Whatu Ora baselines and can be afforded.”
Asked if he expected to see other public sector groups also claim better pay in light of the nurses and secondary teachers before that, Hipkins said: “Typically, with nurses and teachers, the bargaining from them is often a little removed from other public sector bargaining,” adding, “ But, of course, I know that police, firefighters, other big public sector workforces will watch what happens with teachers and nurses closely.”
Health Minister Verrall stressed that, while she was aware that the nurses’ salary settlement had affected “relativities within the health system,” it was important to end “gender-based pay discrimination within our health service, which is what occurred with the nurses’ deal.”
When pressed for details about the contingency fund set aside by the government to pay for the nurses’ pay hike, Hipkins explained: “So there’s a settlement and a pay equity deal, which is, of course, part of the numbers that we’ve just gone through. There was money set aside specifically for that. The money set aside for the wider nurses’ collective agreement, which is the most recent announcement today- that gets taken into account when we set the overall cost adjustment that the health system gets in each Budget.”
Asked if that included back-pay for the nurses, Minister Verrall said the collective agreement “is back-paid from April 2023, and then another tranche will be effective in April 2024.”
The minister clarified that the collective agreement “agreed today is from the Te Whatu Ora baseline. The pay equity deal announced last week was a contingency.”
She added this was “an excellent time to start and stay nursing in New Zealand, given that we have turned around historic pay inequity and are doing a great job of addressing relativities with other professions and jurisdictions.”
Quizzed on whether he saw a way of paying free dental healthcare for all New Zealanders, Prime Minister Hipkins noted that “at the moment, the system wouldn’t have the capacity to be able to deliver it [free dental care for all New Zealanders].”
Responding to a query on the Green Party’s proposal to introduce a wealth tax to pay for free dental care, the PM said: “There would likely be significant investment required just in order to build capacity to meet the need for additional dental care, regardless then of the question of how that dental care itself might be paid for. So I think that the proposal that we’ve seen from the Greens is somewhat simplistic in the sense that there would be a lot more to it than what they’ve set out.”
On renewable energy, the PM said the government was significantly accelerating progress on new wind and solar farms to generate more power.
“I’m announcing today that there are new wind farm projects- three new wind farm projects, that have been approved for fast track consenting. They would cut around 150 million kilograms of carbon emissions and create up to 840 construction jobs in the Manawatu; Waiuku, near Auckland; and in Southland. Combined, they would generate about 419 megawatts of electricity at peak outputs,” the PM added.
He said solar energy projects were also being fast-tracked with nearly two million solar panels “already sped up through the consenting process.”
Venu Menon is an Indian Newslink reporter based in Wellington
