Primary care practices are ultimately responsible for decisions on the pay of nurses they employ, Prime Minister Chris Hipkins says.
Te Whatu Ora hospital nurses have voted to accept the new and improved pay offer brokered by arbitration.
The deal includes a salary increase for all roles covered by the collective of $4000 and an additional flat rate salary increase of $1000 to all designated senior nurses, nurse practitioners and designated senior midwives.
Primary care nurses have warned the pay settlement for their hospital colleagues could exacerbate existing shortages in their sector.
Christchurch primary care nurse and union delegate Denise Moore said even with the pay bump earlier this year, they were still at least 5 percent behind hospital salaries.
"Nurses are leaving and going back either to Te Whatu Ora or to Australia," she said.
Hipkins told Morning Report in principle, nurses who do not work for Te Whatu Ora should be paid as much as their hospital equivalents, "but we don't get to make those decisions, ultimately the practices make those decisions".
There were always negotiations with primary care practices about the appropriate level of government subsidy, and staff costs were a big part of that conversation, but practices were responsible for employing their own staff, and making pay decisions.
"They may choose, for example, to pay doctors more."
Hipkins said the cost of healthcare continued to rise year on year.
"That is just to deliver the same standard of healthcare that New Zealanders get now without actually improving healthcare."
A Labour government was committed to making adequate allowance to keep up with the rising cost of healthcare, he said.
Hipkins said he was not announcing the party's health policy but at present there was no capacity to deliver free dental health care.
The Green Party has promised free dental healthcare for all, to be paid by "fair and simple" changes to the tax system.
"Universal entitlement to free dental healthcare has a multi-billion dollar price tag with it and at the moment we certainly wouldn't have the capacity to deliver that anyway," Hipkins said.
Joining AUKUS '100 percent hypothetical' at the moment
On AUKUS, and whether the government would have a public discussion around whether to join the second pillar (non-nuclear, sharing of cutting edge military technologies), Hipkins said "we always have public discussions about our overall foreign policy approach".
When US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken visited New Zealand last month, he said the door was "very much open for New Zealand and other partners to engage as they see appropriate" regarding the second pillar.
But Hipkins stressed that at the moment it was "100 percent hypothetical because there isn't a proposal to be involved in that".
This comes after comments from former prime minister and Labour Party leader Helen Clark that New Zealand seemed to be losing the ability to "think for itself" and instead was "cutting and pasting from 5 Eyes' partners".
Hipkins rejected the idea that New Zealand did not have an independent foreign policy and said discussions with AUKUS countries were conversations that they would have anyway.
RNZ
