PRIVATE MEMBERS' BUSINESS
Dr RYAN (Kooyong) (11:31): I commend the government for this expansion of the Commonwealth Prac Payment for 10 additional allied health disciplines and thank the member for Holt for bringing this motion to the House. This announcement has been welcomed by students, universities and the health sector. Since I arrived in this place, I have called often and loudly for adequate support of placements in all care disciplines.
Practical placements are an essential component of many degrees. They're mandated for students seeking to become nurses, midwives, teachers, social workers, OTs, physiotherapists, psychologists, vets, dentists, doctors and other occupations that are indispensable for the wellbeing of our communities. It's a complete false economy to require those students to shoulder the cost of these placements alone.
Many students are expected to complete hundreds, even thousands, of hours of mandatory placements while buying groceries and paying for their rent, their transport, their insurances, their equipment and other expenses of daily life in what is a prolonged cost-of-living crisis. During prac placements, students are often unable to maintain their usual paid jobs.
This causes financial stress, deferments and sometimes, tragically, noncompletion of their university courses. I've heard from students from Kooyong and around the country of how difficult things are for them. One occupational therapy student told me they were required to take more than 640 hours of unpaid placement in their final year.
To make ends meet, they had to resign from one job, significantly scale back hours at two other jobs and get help from their parents to cover their accommodation costs. Another described classmates who would finish a day of study, have a brief sleep in their cars, work overnight hospitality shifts and then return to class the next morning. A nursing student told me she'd been forced to defer her final year of study because of an increase in mandatory placement hours that made it impossible to take care of her child.
Another student, a single parent studying nursing and midwifery, said that they ultimately withdrew from placements because they just could not cope with the cost of child care and travel. These are not isolated stories. They're examples of a system that has relied on students paying their own way to complete necessary training at the cost of their own financial security when our communities desperately need the skills that those students are working for.
I welcomed the introduction of the Commonwealth Prac Payment in the 2024-25 Federal Budget. I congratulate the Minister for Education on this expansion of the scheme. Providing financial support to students who are undertaking placements is a sensible measure.
It will help more Australians complete their qualifications. It will help them enter sectors in which workforce shortages are acute. But, while this expansion is positive, it's not the end of the conversation.
Extending prac placement to students in clinical psychology, physiotherapy, occupational therapy, speech pathology, paramedicine, radiography, pharmacy, rehabilitation therapies, audiology and podiatry on top of the existing coverage for nursing, midwifery, teaching and social work students, yes, is great cause for celebration, but the ongoing exclusion of other healthcare students is unfair and it is unsustainable.
Placement poverty is real. The Albanese government needs to explain to us and to the students who are experiencing that poverty why it has chosen to fix it for some but not for others—not for medical, dentistry, veterinary, nutrition and dietetics, optometry and osteopathy students. There is no fair, no equitable rationale for these omissions.
They should be immediately addressed. Our health system, education system and our communities will be stronger when every student has the necessary support to complete their training and contribute their skills to Australia's health workforce. If the objective of this expansion is to remove participation barriers and to strengthen Australia's future workforce, then the government must continue examining how this scheme can be fairly broadened and improved over time.
The Albanese government has to continue closing the gap in education. It must extend paid prac to all care-sector students so that no-one has to interrupt their training to pay for their rent, to pay for their food and to look after their kids.