Queensland Health payroll debacle has a simple solution

Most businesses would use less than six variables.

The more variables that you have in an employee pay rate equation, the more complicated it gets and the more it costs.

Here is the core problem: Every Queensland Health nurse can have up to 26 variables in their pay each pay cycle. Sorry, it can’t be done.

Even worse, it doesn’t need to be done but more than $1.4 billion has been wasted in this pursuit of the unattainable.

Workplace arrangements need to be simple. People just want to be fairly remunerated for their work. Nurses are no different from anyone else.

To show you how simple it could be, Phill Tsingos, the Nurses’ Professional Association of Queensland branch secretary, has a base rate of about $45 an hour.

When you add in all his penalty rates and allowances and then divide by the number of hours he works, he averages about $54 an hour.

That is an example of just two variables. An hourly rate times the number of hours. Phill would be quite happy just being paid like that.

That’s not to suggest everyone should be paid like that. The point is that it would not be too hard to redo all of Queensland Health EBAs facility by facility with no more than, say, eight or 10 variables in each pay cycle so that each payroll at each facility could simply be handled by MYOB.

The Nurses’ Professional Association of Queensland is a competitor to the QNU, which caused this problem.

We think differently. We want to fix it by simplifying it. The only way to do that is to decentralise the system and involve the actual nurses instead of the HR people in the negotiations.

Savings will be immense. Our nurses would be better off and so would taxpayers who would start to see more bang for their health system buck.