Retaining Shellharbour and Port Kembla Hospitals in public hands is a significant victory. 

When the then health minister Jillian Skinner announced in September 2016 that she intended privatising five regional hospitals – at Maitland, Wyong, Goulburn, Bowral and Shellharbour – it seemed like a massive attack on our public health system that would be hard to defeat.

In the decades and decades that privatisations have been imposed on the community it is hard to remember one that was stopped.

Over the last 13 months we have stopped four. It is an incredible achievement by local nurses, midwives, other health workers and their communities.

It has been achieved through community engagement, the boundless commitment and energy of staff and unity between health unions.

When the state government announced it would not proceed with the privatisation of Wyong, Bowral and Goulburn it would have been understandable if heads dropped at Shellharbour and Port Kembla.

But health staff in these hospitals continued to fight hard to keep their hospitals in public hands too. Their success is inspirational and we salute them.

So, four down but there is still one to go. Staff at Maitland have also been resilient and refuse to buckle. They have continued to campaign keep their hospital in public hands. In their case the government has tried to muddy the waters by saying they will give the operation of the hospital over to a not-for-profit organisation. Of course this is still privatisation by another name.

Maitland staff have collected a massive 20,000 signatures on a petition calling on the state government not to privatise their hospital. Maitland only had a population of 68,000 at the 2011 census so this is an incredible achievement.

It is also a clear message from the people of Maitland to the state government: they don’t want a bar of its agenda to privatise local public health services.

Valuable lessons

There is a valuable lesson to be learned from the experiences of this anti-privatisation campaign over the last 13 months. If we get organised and mobilise we can make governments accountable for poor decisions.

When politicians make bad decisions that impact on patient safety and the quality of care we can deliver than we have to engage with the community and put pressure on those politicians to revisit their poor decisions.

There are other lessons too. It is becoming increasingly obvious that the public has tired of the wider neo-liberal agenda that has dominated Australian politics for the last forty years.

People are sick of privatisation and deregulation and economic policy that caters to the self-interest of corporations and the very wealthy.

For a long time we were told that there was no other way. But we beg to differ. And even some conservatives and many economists are beginning to agree (see p. 24).

The public wants to see something done about the widening inequality that has become so evident in Australia. They want strong investment in public health and other public services. They want a minimum wage that is livable. They want a fair industrial relations system that can deliver decent wage increases for everybody. And they want corporations and the wealthy to pay their fair share of tax.

These are reasonable and laudable aspirations. The NSWNMA and the rest of the union movement will continue to fight for a change in the rules until these aspirations are met.