Queensland’s Opposition leader has guaranteed 4,000 graduate nurses will be employed for at least a year under a $111 million-plan if Labor is elected.
Annastacia Palaszczuk said currently, nursing graduates unable to get a job in the sunshine state were looking for work interstate or overseas.
The plan was announced on the Gold coast on Sunday morning when Ms Palaszczuk said the employment guarantee would span the next four years.
“This is a fundamental health reform. We know at the moment a lot of these nurse graduates are not getting jobs in our hospital system,” Ms Palaszczuk said.
“What I’m saying today is if you’re graduating from nursing across this state, you will get a job under a future Labor government.”
Queensland Labor health spokeswoman Joanne Miller said currently, 22 per cent of the nursing workforce were aged 55 and older.
“So in the future what we’re facing is a shortage of nurses and we need to make sure as a Labor Party in government that nurses are available to man the wards across this state,” she said.
Ms Miller said one-third of the money would be quarantined for regional and rural health services.
“We know that many of the students that come here to study nursing actually come from rural and remote Queensland,” she said.
“We would like to encourage them to [return] back out west and to go north to hone their skills in this graduate program.”
‘Too early to talk tender’
Meanwhile, Premier Campbell Newman said it was too early to give details about which companies would be interested in leasing Queensland’s publicly-owned assets.
Mr Newman has committed billions of dollars to infrastructure projects based on the proposed privatisation of public assets.
He acknowledged that the Government still needed a mandate to divest those assets and said it was too early to speculate on which companies would lead the tender process.
The Premier would not rule out allowing foreign-owned companies to take control, saying the long-term lease gives Queenslanders more security over them.
“The assets are always owned by the people of Queensland,” he said.
“You cannot dig them up and take them away.”
Mr Newman said his preference was for Australian superannuation funds to lease in the assets but acknowledged other types of investors would also be interested.