BY GEOFF FRANCIS
HOBART — There's nothing new about cuts to health care and hospital closures in Tasmania — successive governments have been at it for at least a decade. What is different about Labor Premier Jim Bacon's latest planned closure — of the Royal Derwent Hospital at New Norfolk — is that this time the unions and the workers have decided to fight back.
In response, the health minister, Judy Jackson, has promised to personally lead a scabs' army across their picket lines.
One hundred Health and Community Service Union members walked off the job for a two-hour stoppage on October 6, after approving a campaign of rolling stoppages. Actions are planned for every six hours.
Staff are refusing to assist in moving patients out of the hospital, scheduled to be closed by the end of November, because the government is refusing to provide the staff required for their ongoing care.
Bacon's spin doctors have absurdly claimed that the government is not on a cost-cutting drive but is rather aiming to improve the quality of health care for institutionalised mental patients.
But this "improvement" in services would not only involve the closure of patients' current residential facility but also the abolition of some 50 health care jobs. Patients will have to fend for themselves without adequate care or support.
At the height of the maritime dispute in 1998, then-opposition leader Bacon, a former Builders Labourers Federation official, criticised other Labor governments for losing touch with their grassroots. He promised that his administration would not make the same mistakes.
Less than two years later, one of his ministers is sitting in her office drawing up a scabs' roster.
Jackson made her initial threat to cross picket lines in parliament on October 5 and has repeated it twice since.
"Since making that statement this morning", boasted Jackson on October 5, "I've had a number of people call and say: 'I'll be there too'".
Without irony, she added, "The people we are talking about need 24-hour care. Obviously we have got to have plans to support those people if the staff leave them and walk off the job".
Health and Community Services Union state secretary Mike Hall has responded angrily to Jackson's cynical manoeuvre, saying "Our members have been caring for these patients for a long time and if it came to a choice between the minister and my members as to who knows what is best for the clients, I know who I would choose".
Hall also pointed out that HACSU members had been forced to take industrial action in a bid to get the health department back into negotiations. The government has cancelled three meetings with the union scheduled to talk about the closure and is still refusing to restart negotiations.
The ALP-dominated Tasmanian Trades and Labor Council appears for now to be hedging its bets, failing to give its unqualified support to HACSU. TTLC secretary Lynne Fitzgerald has merely said that she was sure Jackson would receive advice that her proposed action was "not appropriate".