Stephen Garvey, Melbourne
Victoria's ambulance paramedics have refused to obey an order issued on July 30 by the Australian Industrial Relations Commission (AIRC) to lift work bans. Paramedics lifted bans on ambulance bypass, pre-bypass and categorising patients based on urgency. But 27 other bans will remain in place.
Ambulance Employees Australia (AEA) Victorian secretary Rod Morris said the decision to lift three bans was "in no way conceding that our actions impacted on the community or on hospitals".
Paramedics in the field will continue to refuse to record patient billing details, thus making services "free". They will also refuse to transport patients to lower level care facilities and they will not attend scenes that may be violent without a police escort.
Paramedics are seeking a 12% pay rise over three-and-a-half years, plus $96 a week in recognition of extra skills they have acquired. They also want Premier Steve Bracks' Labor government to hire more paramedics. The government has offered a pay rise of 3% per year over the same period and has rejected the skills allowance.
Morris has vowed to do "whatever it takes" — including going to jail — to prevent paramedics from working in "sweatshop conditions".
"We are astounded that a Labor government would fail to understand where we are coming from. They are treating us like the enemy", he told Green Left Weekly.
The government is blaming the current crisis of hospital emergency services on the AEA. It argues that the AEA's bans are placing lives at risk. Although the bans do not cover delivering patients to hospitals, it has been argued that bans on assessment mean that patients are taken to the nearest emergency hospital regardless of their condition. The government claims this places an increasing workload on hospital services.
In testimony before the AIRC, a paramedic accused former Victorian health minister John Thwaites of instructing the Monash Medical Centre's emergency department not to go on bypass in the run-up to the 2002 state election.
Mark Fitzgerald, the director of emergency services at the Alfred hospital, gave testimony in which he criticised the pre-bypass system introduced by the government two years ago. He said this system, where emergency departments alert other hospital departments of overload and encourage ambulances to bypass patients, is being used excessively. As a result, an extra burden was being placed on the ambulance system and on its patients.
Morris argued in the June 20 Melbourne Herald-Sun that if the government's concerns were serious, it would provide more staff and other resources for hospitals to cope during the dispute. He also claimed that hospitals are in crisis at the moment due to under-resourcing and not because of paramedics' bans.
Most hospitals contacted by the Melbourne Age last week said the bans have had a minimal impact on their work.
Writing in the opinion section of the July 23 Age, one paramedic argued that the government "seems hell-bent on focusing on our industrial action instead of on what we are asking for and why".
If the government really cared about the quality of public health services in Victoria it would ensure that more paramedics and ambulance vehicles were provided, as the AEA has demanded, Lalitha Chelliah, a nurse and a Socialist Alliance Senate candidate, told GLW.
"The fact that an essential emergency service has had to go on strike is a disgrace", Chelliah added. She argued that Victoria's public health services have been completely run down and waiting lists for basic services have lengthened dramatically.
The key cause of the public health crisis, in Chelliah's view, has been federal and state governments' drive to gradually privatise heath services, including ambulance services. She cited the example of private membership subscriptions to ambulance services. These are being used to abrogate the government's financial responsibilities, she argued.
The maintenance of this user-pays system upon such a crucial service clearly shows "that Bracks doesn't respect peoples lives", Chelliah said.
The AIRC has not only imposed a "safety" order instructing paramedics to end all bans, but also ordered that industrial action can not be taken for six months.
Morris told GLW that the AIRC hearing had failed to provide even one concrete instance where a patient had been directly placed in danger due to the bans.
From Green Left Weekly, August 4, 2004.
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