Julie Collins (Franklin, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Regional Development and Local Government) Share this | Hansard source

I want to ask the assistant minister about residential aged care funding, now that I have raised some serious issues about home care packages. In my previous question is to the minister I said that the sector and the public particularly are very pleased that aged care has not had cuts in this budget, as it has in previous ones. Most of the cuts in the previous budgets have come from funding for residential aged care, particularly around the Aged Care Funding Instrument, ACFI. There has been a lot of upset over the changes in ACFI. There has been a lot of concern about the unpredictability of the ACFI modelling and the instrument itself.

As the minister would know, ACFI is a complex tool for funding. For some time I have raised the matter of this model being broken, in my view. I understand that the sector is giving the minister the same message and that the government is giving the minister the same message. Indeed, the minister engaged the University of Wollongong to undertake a review of the aged care assessment classification and funding models and to provide options. We asked some questions in estimates about when the government is going to respond to the report from the University of Wollongong, and whether or not the government agreed with the recommendations of the report from the University of Wollongong. It was very difficult to get a straight answer. So it would be good if the minister could say today whether or not he will formally respond to the report from the University of Wollongong, when he will respond to the report from the University of Wollongong, whether or not he agrees that ACFI is no longer fit for purpose and whether he believes ACFI should be replaced with a new funding model or a blend of ACFI and something else. It would be useful for everybody in this place to understand these things.

The industry needs certainty and predictability of funding for aged care so that they can get beds online. The minister announced an Aged Care Approvals Round, ACAR, just last week, which is interesting because some of the places from the previous ACAR are still not filled. Some of those beds have not yet been put online. Some people in the sector do not have the capacity to bring them online because they are worried about the unpredictability and the lack of certainty in the sector and in future funding.

I understand that a separate review of ACFI is underway by Applied Aged Care Solutions. I would like to know whether that report is going to be publicly released, and when. There is also the Deloitte Access Economics report, which will provide an analysis of unmet demand and the potential implications of uncapping supply in aged care. I would like to know if that is going to be released publicly, and if so, when? There are the Ernst & Young review of residential aged care legislation and the Ernst & Young consultancy to undertake an Aged Care Funding Instrument audit. So there are lots of external consultants doing a lot of the work that, I think, the government should be doing. I am curious as to whether or not these reports are going to be publicly available. Minister, could you tell us if they will be and when they will be, and why the department is not doing this work?

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