Conference 2026 opens with re-election of PANSW leadership
President Kevin Morton, Vice President Ian Allwood, and Treasurer Roger Campton, were all re-elected at the PANSW Conference today, unanimously and unopposed.
Mr Morton, Allwood and Campton have overseen significant achievements at the Police Association since being elected at Conference 2022.
In that time, they have delivered:
- Award 2024, one of the best Award offer in decades, the envy of other public sector workers in NSW and police officers around Australia.
- The resolution of the Concessional Cap issue through the Fix our Super campaign, the most important issue for the long term financial security of police officers during their career and in retirement.
- A significant increase in funding made available by the NSW Government for police health and wellbeing strategies, designed to support police and retain experienced serving police officers.
- Pay to train entitlements for recruits at the NSWPF Academy, to attract new police officers to fill vacancies.
- Successful advocacy on prisoner transport/management and mental health incident response, pushing back on other agencies shifting their work to police, and convincing the NSW Government and NSWPF to reduce police workload on these issues.
The PANSW has achieved considerable wins and have met challenges head on.
Despite this success, President Morton said he still has much more he wants to achieve in his second term.
Retaining our police is President Morton’s top priority for the PANSW. We will be pushing the NSW Government to show more urgency to retain police officers.
At Conference, addressing the elected Delegates that represent your workplaces, President Morton said the PANSW exists and works every day to enable members to be the driving force of policing in NSW.
Your elected Delegates will be working hard for the remainder of Conference on setting the agenda and priorities to recognise and alleviate workload across NSW, drive strategies to effectively retain serving police officers, and filling vacancies across NSW.
We will be bringing you daily updates throughout this week, letting you know what is happening at Conference 2026.
Police Federation of Australia Report
PFA CEO Scott Weber and PANSW Secretary Pat Gooley gave an update on the work to achieve retention and wellbeing strategies through the Federal Government.
A Police Blue Card is our main priority at the Federal level. This would provide police officers with access to health services and treatment, at no cost to police officers, for key health issues affecting police, ideally covering mental health, certain forms of cancer, diabetes, bruxism, and more.\
We are currently working with Federal Ministers on cost estimates for models of delivering these medical entitlements to police across Australia, and also designing the most effective way a Blue Card could deliver medical services to NSW police officers and how it would interact with our workers compensation entitlements.
We intend to push this at a state and Federal level as a key priority for the PANSW and PFA in 2026.
Longest serving Executive awarded Life Membership
Today, your elected Delegates honoured our longest serving Executive Member in the PANSW’s history: Detective Sergeant Stephen McDonald.
Stephen has been an Executive member for 26 years, nearly a quarter of the time the PANSW has existed. He has attended Conference as a Delegate 15 times.
He has been involved in such important developments including representing members on the Detectives Board, entitlements for Sydney Olympics, Taser and Glock rollouts. Introduction of detective pay scales. The introduction of Eaglei.
He has mentored countless new Executive members, leaving his mark on how your Executive represent you and oversee the democratic running of the PANSW.
Your Delegates unanimously endorsed Mr McDonald becoming a PANSW Life Member.