Nick Xenophon (SA, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

I will make a brief contribution on the Aged Care and Other Legislation Amendment Bill 2014 and related bill, but the brevity of my contribution should be seen as inversely proportional to the importance of this issue. I will be supporting this legislation but I will be doing so reluctantly. I agree with Senator Lines that this was not a dirty deal between the unions and the former government. But it was a messy deal—and I will get into that shortly.

I have a number of concerns in relation to this bill. First among them is the government's winding back of the workforce supplement for aged-care workers. I understand that the passage of this bill will not change the fact that the money has been rolled over into payments to providers. The money is, in effect, gone, and opposing this bill will not change that. I do note that there is a second reading amendment, which I think has a lot of merit. It walks about the failure of the government to deal with a number of issues in respect of aged care. Whilst that second reading amendment is not binding on this parliament, it is a statement of fact that more needs to be done and that there are policy voids that need to be dealt with as a matter of some urgency.

I raised concerns about the former government's practice of providing what some would regard as artificial pay rises through legislation last year in reference to both the child-care and aged-care sectors. They are both sectors that are doing it pretty tough. In the child-care sector, you get to a tipping point where, if child-care fees become less and less affordable, more and more people will take their children out of childcare and come to alternative—and, in some cases, less than satisfactory—arrangements or, mainly, women will simply stop participating in the workforce, which is a double whammy in terms of the impact it has on our economy arrangements and it also pushes up the price of childcare as more and more people dip out of the sector.

The aged-care sector has some parallel issues in terms of the viability of the aged-care sector. It is a tough sector to be in. It is a sector where affordability is also important. The rules have recently been changed, engineered by former minister Mark Butler. I think a number of those change were quite good and sensible changes in order to make the sector more robust and more sustainable, but it is a very tough sector to be in. As more and more Australians are getting older, there will be a need to support this growing number of patients, customers or clients of the aged-care sector and there will be more and more pressure in terms of finite resources. As I said at the time, there is no doubt that the workers in both of these sectors deserve to have higher rates of pay. But the roundabout way the former government approached this, in a sense circumventing the Fair Work process, put workers at risk and potential disadvantage. It was the ad hoc nature of it that I was concerned about, including in the childcare sector.

The current government's reallocation of the supplement has sadly validated my concerns. Because the former government did not go through Fair Work and because of the way it chose to artificially raise wages, the current government has been able to simply take the money back again. This has, in a sense, left workers worse off than they were before—not strictly in a monetary sense, but in the sense that they expected a pay rise and have likely acted accordingly only to find they are not receiving it after all—and this is simply unfair. I have significant concerns that the measures that were supposed to reform the aged-care system may not be achieving the changes that we need. My reluctance to support this bill is based on these concerns. I do acknowledge the comments of Glenn Rees, the CEO of Alzheimer's Australia, who: firstly, agreed with the union position that 'the $1.1 billion should not be returned to the sector without clear accountability requirements on how the funding will meet wage parity objectives' and, secondly, said that the 'possible conditions raised by providers during discussions did not go far enough to achieve the level of accountability and transparency consumers and unions were seeking'. These are matters that I hope will be explored in the committee stage of this bill. I presume either my crossbench colleagues or the opposition will be pursuing that, as it should be.

These issues are of vital importance in my home state of South Australia because of its ageing population—it has the most aged demographic on the mainland; however, these issues also affect us on a personal level as our own families age and we face the reality of seeking the appropriate care for our parents or other relatives. Older Australians are relying on us to ensure that the system provides care and support and, most of all, dignity to our senior citizens.