Next year, more than 2,000 Victorian graduate nurses will be left without jobs.
Nurses are essential workers. During the Covid 19 pandemic, they got us through. We needed more and we got them. Record numbers of Victorians enrolled in nursing, but incredibly, many now can’t find jobs. An emergency funding package for graduate nurses is urgently needed, and we join the Australian Nursing and Midwifery Federation (ANMF) in calling on the Allan Labor Government to deliver it.
Not a day goes by that we don’t hear about nurse shortages, pressure on the health system, burned out health workers and emergency wait times. No one doubts the need for more skilled health professionals in Victoria and to this end, the Victorian Government offered to pay course fees for more than 10,000 nursing and midwifery undergraduates in hopes to boost staffing across a strained system.
It worked. But graduate nurses need graduate positions.
The ANMF has called for an emergency funding package to ensure these bright, eager and talented nurses find work. While there may be a short-term surplus of graduates, the government’s own modelling shows that we will need those nurses in less than two years. Highly skilled graduates are not going to sit around unemployed and wait for work that may or may not come – we will lose them.
This week, Rachel Payne MP will call on the Allan Labor Government to deliver an emergency funding package to ensure nursing and midwifery graduates secure work. We want to know why the Government would leave nursing graduates – that they actively recruited – without jobs and, whether they will deliver on their promises to those students. We need to keep these nurses; for their sakes and, for our health system.
Published Wednesday the 12th of November 2025.
Quotes attributable to Rachel Payne:
“The ANMF met with final-year students last week and staggeringly, 70% did not receive a graduate position. These people – primarily young women – were told they were needed. They were told they were essential workers. They were told they would be the “most important job in the health system” and now, we have left them high and dry.”
“The starting salary for a registered nurse in Victoria is about $67,000 – or around $30 per hour. Nurses are clearly not in it for the money, but if we leave these graduates unemployed, they will no doubt find other work that is likely to be more highly paid and less demanding. What a terrible waste of their talent and good will.”
