Shayne Neumann (Blair, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Indigenous Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

Labor supports this particular legislation. We want better, fairer, more sustainable and nationally consistent aged care in this country. We want to make sure that aged care is affordable. We want to make sure that people have choice. We want to put consumers in control of their lives with respect to aged care. We want to encourage businesses to invest and to grow. We want diverse, rewarding career options for those people who work in this sector. That is why, when we were in power, we put forward a 10-year strategy known as Living Longer Living Better. We made sure that we had a strategy to roll forward into the future.

I am pleased the current government has, in large part, supported that, but we are concerned as to where the savings will come from in relation to this particular measure that is before the chamber. The bill and the explanatory memorandum talk about $2.8 million of savings over four years. We are assured by the government that the 130 full-time equivalent DSS staff will see no loss of jobs and that there will be no reduction in staffing in that particular area. As the minister said, this comes from a recommendation of Professor Merrilyn Walton in her review into the aged-care sector. She is a professor of medical education at the University of Sydney. As a result of that review, there was a call for a more independent statutory authority. Professor Walton's review found that a separate body from the department that primarily funded and regulated aged care was necessary to remove concerns about the impartiality of decisions in circumstances where aged-care complaints were made to the department secretary.

The situation is that complaints in relation to consumers and providers will not really vary. The government says these are efficiencies. We are concerned about that aspect. It is unclear how appeals and reviews will be undertaken, by whom and to what place. We think it is imperative that there be independence in relation to the commissioner, and we have some concern about the co-location of staff in DSS offices. I note that the transition is due to take place on 1 January next year.

In circumstances where the federal government is both the major funder—providing 76 per cent of residential aged-care costs—and the regulator of aged care, it is important that there be integrity in the system. The Aged Care Complaints Scheme provides some of that protection. We support the legislation, and so do Catholic Health Australia. They note that it has long been recognised that good governance in public administration requires the separation of the regulatory arms of government from policy and funding arms.

There is concern, as I have said. The seniors lobby, the Combined Pensioners and Superannuants Association of NSW, queried whether the commissioner would have sufficient staff to handle the 4,000 complaints which are received every year. So we call on the government to make sure there is adequate staffing in the department for the commissioner to do this job.

It is important that the government handles not just the complaints mechanism but also the access to the aged-care system that is so crucial to the integrity of the aged-care system. I note there has been much criticism at the front end of the aged-care sector. In fact, the government has admitted its new online aged-care referral system—myagedcare.gov—has had problems and has been criticised by doctors and aged-care providers. So I call on the government in this speech to look at that aspect of the aged-care sector. The feedback I have received after my speech at the national conference of ACSA in Perth recently and afterwards as I have done roundtables around the country, be it in Brisbane, Bendigo or anywhere, in relation to the aged-care sector shows concern not just about the complaints mechanism but also about access to aged care for those people who, as they get older, need home care, those people who need the Commonwealth Home Support Program provided to them and also those people—and the average age is about 85 years—who need residential aged care.

The government really needs to have a look at that aspect. It is not just about these reforms that are currently before the chamber which are receiving bipartisan support from the opposition; the government needs to have a look at a whole range of areas where it has taken its eyes off the ball. The government has adopted the recommendations here, and we commend the government for that. But I do not think slashing $20 million from innovative care projects, slashing $40 million from Aged Care Workforce Fund, the cuts abandoning the Younger Onset Dementia Key Worker Program from 2016 or discarding the world's first dementia risk reduction program, Your Brain Matters, is really in the best interests of aged care in this country.

The government are doing a few good things, and we have offered them support in relation to the deregulatory scheme. In fact, we offered them support when they provided some legislation in relation to building certification as part of their red tape repeal day. But our job as the opposition is to hold them to account, and so I do call on the assistant minister to produce the stocktake of government funded dementia programs. They have now got a conversation starter, provided by KPMG.

We still have not seen the stocktake of workforce programs that they need to actually provide the necessary funding for a proper workforce in the sector. We have got about 300,000 people working in the aged-care sector, but in the next five to 10 years we will need about 56,000 more. While the government finally got rid of the workforce supplement in December 3013, there has been no audit or stocktake from the government, which they promised they would provide in February 2014 when the minister announced that he would undertake that. Further, the ministerial dementia forums, which are supposed to be held annually, have not been held.

This is a government which is doing a good thing with this legislation today, but we are still waiting to hear from a government which really needs to focus more on ageing. We are talking about a portfolio that is responsible for about $15 billion of federal government money—this is taxpayers' money. We want to make sure that the sector has improved wages, good career development and increases in the number of job seekers knocking on aged-care providers' doors to get into the sector, and that has not happened, and we have seen no improvement in the profitability of the sector.

It is important that the government take notice of what the sector is having to say. So while the legislation here deals with the complaints mechanism, they are not actually handling properly the implementation of Labor's Living Longer Living Better reforms, and the My Aged Care website and the hotline are difficult to navigate, complex and very flawed, and I ask the government to address this. In circumstances where we have had a number of aged-care providers at forums I have been at around the country, they have said to me they have got almost no referrals through the My Aged Care website. Indeed, if they had not had people on their waiting lists they would not have had anything happen in the last few months. That is simply not good enough.

The government needs to address those issues and make sure that we have got the necessary aged-care assessments and the home care packages and make sure that the kind of grassroots support which people need is actually delivered. At the moment people are bypassing the sector as best they can. That is the feedback I have been getting. I call on the government to work in close collaboration with the aged-care sector to improve, listen to consumers, listen to providers, resolve these issues and improve the aged-care sector, then we will not be in that position where we have to keep criticising the government and making sure that we do speeches like this in parliament and do press conferences and press releases which criticise the government for taking their eye off the ball in this sector. I commend them for this legislation. We offer our support. But they really need to improve the situation with respect to their provision of aged care in this country.

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