For the first time in 23 years, public-sector nurses and midwives in the Australian state of Queensland are taking industrial action. The more than 40,000 health workers are opposing a miserable pay offer from the state Liberal National Party (LNP) government, which will cut their real wages and do nothing to improve worsening conditions in the public health system.
The conservative LNP government, led by Premier David Cristafulli, is also attacking job conditions including demands for reductions in parental leave, reproductive leave, and flexible working arrangements.
More than 96 percent of public-sector nurses and midwives voted to strike, compelling the Queensland Nurses and Midwives Union (QNMU) to call the first industrial action in two decades. But the union bureaucracy, which boasts of its “strong history of adopting an interest-based problem-solving bargaining approach … and working collaboratively on solutions” with Queensland Health, is working to keep this action as limited as possible.
The union’s so-called “stage 1” actions, which began Thursday, call for members to “wear QNMU badges and shirts, put up posters, and wear pink.” Comments from nurses and midwives online indicate that even these toothless and deliberately non-disruptive measures are poorly prepared, with members unable to get union shirts and forced to scour local shops for anything pink in order to participate. The QNMU has given health workers no indication of when (or if) more substantive industrial action will commence, or of what it will consist.
Nurses and midwives should be warned—the limited character of the action called by the QNMU is a stark sign that the union bureaucracy plans to wear them down with ineffectual measures, isolated within individual hospitals, before pushing through a sell-out deal with the state government.
Of even more concern for Queensland nurses and midwives, however, should be the fact that the union leadership has no concrete demands, including on pay, but is merely pleading that the LNP government delivers on its election promise of “nation-leading wages.” But nurses and midwives throughout the country, as in Queensland, have all been subjected to punitive pay rise caps for years, as well as large real wage cuts amid soaring inflation more recently.
In place of actual demands, the union makes vague calls for “gender-based equity in pay,” and “leadership support,” as well as points on “safe staffing”—i.e., nurse to patient ratios—and “health and safety,” which are already existing policies that have been systematically ignored under successive governments, in part because chronic understaffing makes them impossible.
The union’s list of bargaining “interests” contains nothing that would resolve the conditions of the system in which Queensland nurses and midwives work. They are confronted with a crumbling public healthcare system, with inadequate staffing, poor infrastructure, with the ongoing impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and deepening social crisis causing a rise in patient numbers and severity of illness.
The Cristafulli government has made it clear that it intends to force nurses and midwives to accept its dictates. In March this year, the government threatened workers with loss of back pay if they did not immediately accept its proposal, without undertaking industrial action. The offer, of a 3 percent pay rise in 2025, followed by 2.5 percent in each of the next two years, is scarcely higher than the current official inflation rate of 2.4 percent, let alone the real rising living costs confronting the working class.
Under the proposed deal, an average full-time enrolled nurse with 3 years of experience would have an annual wage of just $81,300 by 2027, while a registered nurse or midwife would make just over $100,000. The median house price in Brisbane, the state capital and largest city, is already $1 million as of June 2025, 10–12 times average nursing wages.
Moreover, Queensland public hospitals are in crisis. After decades of cuts by both LNP and Labor Party governments, as of 2024 there were only 13,800 hospital beds available for 5.6 million people.
As a result, patients experience long wait times in getting admitted to hospital, even those brought by ambulance. While clinical guidelines indicate that 90 percent of patients should be transferred from the ambulance to a hospital bed within 30 minutes, in 2024 just 60 percent of patient transfers met this standard statewide, with some waiting as long as 8 hours in the working-class areas of Ipswich and Logan. This phenomenon of waiting in ambulances, called ramping, puts patients at risk of becoming sicker and even dying while waiting for care.
Public clinic and surgical waitlists have blown out and are now the longest in a decade. Queensland patients wait a median 50 days for elective surgery, up from 27 in 2003.
As a result of these conditions and poor wages, nursing in Queensland faces a retention crisis. Nursing staff turnover in 2022–23 was at 7 percent, and 15 percent in regional and rural areas, twice as high as pre-pandemic levels. A June 2024 survey of 20,000 QNMU members indicated that 46 percent were considering leaving the profession in the next year, in response to work-related fatigue and burnout.
These statistics, and the overwhelming vote in favour of a strike exposes the myth perpetrated by the unions in strikes by health workers in other parts of Australia, such as doctors and nurses in New South Wales (NSW), that Queensland working conditions are substantially better than other states of the country. Nurses, midwives, doctors, and health workers more broadly, face and are trying to fight against the systematic destruction of their jobs and living standards, while the public hospital system suffers consistent and deliberate underfunding.
These attacks are bipartisan. In office from 2015–2024, the Queensland Labor government essentially froze the wages of health workers with sub-inflationary pay “rises,” and refused to reverse the cuts to staff made by the previous LNP government, which sacked 11,000 health-workers during its period in office. Labor oversaw the initial response to COVID-19, including the decision in December 2021 to end any efforts to contain the spread of the pandemic, causing ongoing waves of illness and death, and pushing public hospitals to breaking point.
In neighbouring NSW, the current Labor government is seeking to impose further real wage cuts throughout the public health system. It has utilised the state Industrial Relations Commission to shut down and ban strikes and other protest actions by nurses, midwives, doctors and psychiatrists, as well as threatening medical professionals with de-registration, which would prevent them from practicing. These attacks have been facilitated by the NSW Nurses and Midwives Association and Australian Salaried Medical Officers Federation, which have enforced the anti-democratic strike bans and insisted that workers can achieve their demands through plaintive appeals to the very government that is attacking their wages and conditions.
Despite decades of attacks on public healthcare, including the mass firings carried out by the LNP government in 2012–15, the QNMU leadership has prevented industrial action by nurses and midwives for more than 20 years.
QNMU has a track record of imposing sellout deals for inadequate wages. The existing enterprise agreement for nurses and midwives, ratified in 2023 after more than a year of negotiations with the previous Labor government, only included nominal wage rises of 11 percent over three years (2022–2025), during a period in which inflation reached 7.8 percent in 2022, and 5.6 percent in 2023, and the cost of food, housing and other necessities rose even more rapidly.
Now, the union claims that limited industrial action, restricted to one section of health workers, will be sufficient to get the Cristafulli government to make a better deal, without even outlining a single concrete demand.
Despite the common struggle faced by health workers everywhere, the QNMU is deliberately keeping Queensland nurses and midwives isolated from their counterparts in other states, and even other health workers within Queensland, including junior doctors, whose agreement with Queensland Health expires in June this year.
Health workers must fight back! But to be successful, Queensland nurses and midwives must wrest control of their struggle from the QNMU bureaucracy, which, like the unions in other states and internationally, will seek to curtail the dispute and impose a sellout.
Nurses and midwives need to build their own independent rank-and-file committees of struggle at their workplaces, with the task of formulating a set of demands based on the actual needs of workers, coordinating and expanding strike action and joining their struggles with those of other workers, throughout the health sector and more broadly.
The fight for improved wages and conditions for nurses and midwives is inseparable from the privatisation drive and the evisceration of the public health system. This poses the need for a political struggle, against the LNP and Labor, as well as the unions, which all defend the capitalist system and the subordination of all societal needs, including high-quality health care freely accessible to all, to the profit demands of the corporate and financial elite.
We call on nurses and midwives to contact the Health Workers Rank and File Committee (HWRFC) today, to discuss this perspective and how you can build such committees at your workplace, and advance the struggle of health workers to defend public healthcare, including wages and job conditions.
Contact the Health Workers’ Rank-and-File Committee (HWRFC):
Email: sephw.aus@gmail.com
Twitter: @HealthRandF_Aus
Facebook: facebook.com/groups/hwrfcaus