FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
July 2026
23 July 2026 – The Council of Australian Postgraduate Associations (CAPA), the peak body representing Australia’s approximately 570,000 postgraduate students, welcomes the Federal Government’s announcement to extend the Commonwealth Prac Payment to students in allied health degrees. The decision caps a sustained joint effort by CAPA, the Health Services Union, and crossbench parliamentarians Dr Helen Haines, the Independent Member for Indi; ACT Senator David Pocock; and Dr Monique Ryan, the Member for Kooyong. It is a significant win. It is also a strong first step.
Previously, the Commonwealth Prac Payment reached only teaching, nursing, midwifery and social work students. It will now cover allied health: physiotherapy, occupational therapy, clinical psychology, pharmacy, podiatry, speech pathology, audiology, radiography, rehabilitation therapies and paramedicine. Many of these are postgraduate degrees; clinical psychology alone carries some of the most demanding placement requirements of any qualification in the country. The change answers a workforce reality CAPA has pressed for two years: 20 allied health occupations are in national shortage, and placement poverty has been driving students out of the very degrees the health system most needs them to finish.
When the Government introduced the payment, it accepted that no student should have to choose between eating and completing a mandatory, unpaid, full-time placement. CAPA and the Health Services Union have argued since early 2025, in successive pre-budget submissions lodged with NATSIPA, and in Parliament House itself, that this principle cannot logically stop at four professions. That case was carried into the heart of government by crossbench members who refused to let it drop. Today, for allied health, it has been won.
The scale of the problem it addresses has real implications for the country. The average postgraduate allied health student completes 901 hours of mandatory placement. More than 70 per cent of students on allied health placements report food insecurity, and only 18.2 per cent of domestic postgraduate coursework students receive any study-related income support. For these students, a placement is full-time unpaid work undertaken while the rent still falls due.
“Extending the Commonwealth Prac Payment to allied health is a genuine win for postgraduates, and a sign that the Government is listening. For students in fields like clinical psychology and physiotherapy, who spend hundreds of hours on unpaid, full-time placement, this is real income and overdue recognition. I want to thank the Government for acting, and Helen Haines, David Pocock and Monique Ryan, who carried this case in Parliament when it mattered,” said CAPA National President, Jesse Gardner-Russell.
“Last year, CAPA and the Health Services Union brought students into Parliament House and put placement poverty directly to more than ten members of parliament. I spoke about my own experience, working full-time on unpaid placement while the rent and the bills did not stop. Today those members have answered for allied health students, and it shows what happens when postgraduates are given the room to make their case. Now we need that same resolve for the students still left out,” said CAPA National Vice President, Richard Lee.
But two disciplines have been left waiting, and they are the two whose students undertake some of the longest and most intensive unpaid placements of anyone. Medical students are routinely advised by their own faculties to work no more than five hours a week during placement blocks; veterinary science students face comparably relentless clinical demands. The Doctor of Medicine is a postgraduate degree: the students excluded today are postgraduates doing full-time clinical work for no pay. Rural general physician demand is projected to grow 58 per cent by 2031. We have an unfinished job that needs attention.
And it is an affordable one. A Parliamentary Budget Office costing, commissioned by Dr Helen Haines, found that extending the payment to allied health and medicine together would cost A$290.4 million over four years. The Government has now funded the larger, more populous allied health share. Completing it for medicine is the smaller, final step.
“You cannot accept that students shouldn’t go hungry on placement and then leave out the medical, dental and veterinary students doing the longest placements of all. The principle is settled. Finishing the job for medicine costs a fraction of what has already been committed, and it is the difference between a health workforce we can staff and one we cannot. We are asking the Government to complete the reform it has started,” said Mr Gardner-Russell.
CAPA calls on the Federal Government to extend the Commonwealth Prac Payment to all postgraduate students undertaking mandatory placements, beginning with all of allied health, medicine, dental, and veterinary science, and to ensure the payment is indexed.
—ENDS—
Jesse Gardner-Russell
PhD Candidate (Ophthalmology) The University of Melbourne
National President
Council of Australian Postgraduate Associations Inc.
Level 1, 120 Clarendon St, Southbank, Victoria 3006
president@capa.edu.au
0431288846
