Anne Urquhart (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Aged Care and Other Legislation Amendment Bill 2014 and the Health and Other Services (Compensation) Care Charges Amendment Bill 2014. These bills create the provisions to recover prior costs for home care provided to people who received a compensation payment. As this is currently the situation for people in residential care, the changes merely bring home care arrangements into alignment. This is a common-sense provision that Labor will not stand in the way of.

Similarly, we support the amendments to the Healthcare Identifiers Act to allow for the collection, use and disclosure of relevant data to be used in the aged-care gateway, My Aged Care. My Aged Care is an online service designed to help families navigate the aged-care system. It provides up-to-date information and a central portal for all information on aged care.

My Aged Care was a key element of Labor's landmark Living Longer, Living Better aged-care package, which was brought before the last parliament. The Living Longer, Living Better legislation package laid the foundations for a more responsive, reliable and streamlined system to give older Australians high-quality, accessible and affordable care. It set a framework to ensure Australians would get the aged care they want and need regardless of where they live or their financial means. It included consumer-directed care packages to give people more control over the care they receive and close to a billion dollars in new funding for home care to increase the number of home support packages. In addition, there was increased funding for residential aged care to support 30,000 new places over five years, tailored packages for people with dementia and funding for aged-care homes to significantly upgrade their facilities.

Living Longer, living better was welcomed by older Australians, aged-care service provider organisations, professional bodies and unions active in aged care. In fact, it was considered to be so vitally important that 22 organisations representing many of the largest aged-care providers, both not-for-profit and private as well as consumer body, COTA, the two key unions, Alzheimer's Australia and several other representative organisations, joined forces to pen a letter urging:

… in the strongest terms that the current legislation pass this Parliament, with or without amendments that may be proposed by the Committee.

And rightly so.

The ageing of our population is perhaps one of the most pressing issues that governments across the globe face today. A growing tendency to have fewer children, coupled with a significantly increased lifespan, will lead to massive changes in our national demographic make-up in the decades to come. The proportion of Australia's population aged over 65 was 8 per cent in 1970-71. The 2010 intergenerational aged-care report projected that over the next 40 years that proportion of the population over 65 years will almost double to around 25 per cent. So we are getting older.

Tasmania is currently home to more than 80,000 people over the age of 65 and our population is ageing more rapidly than any other jurisdiction, making this legislation vital for our community. Along with other landmark legislation such as NDIS and the landmark Gonski education reforms, Living longer. Living better.stands as part of the proud legacy of the Labor government that was committed to constant improvement and considered, compassionate policy.

One of the key elements of Labor's aged-care reforms was the workforce supplement, which was designed to address looming workforce shortages in the aged-care sector. The supplement allowed providers to deliver better wages and attract and retain appropriately skilled staff. The aged-care workforce is one of the largest service industries in this country. It employs over 250,000 people, caters to the needs of over 1.1 million older Australians and accounts for about one per cent of GDP in terms of Commonwealth funding alone. But the unavoidable reality is that the aged-care workforce is at crisis point. If we do nothing, we simply will not have the staff we need to ensure that Australians receive the care they need in their senior years.

The aged-care workforce is ageing itself with the average age of an aged-care nurse sitting at 48.5 years as opposed to 44.5 years for other nurses. A full 53.9 per cent of aged-care nurses are over 50 compared to 38.6 per cent of nurses across other sectors. Aged-care providers simply are not able to offer the wages that are necessary to ensure they have enough staff. In fact, the Australian Nursing & Midwifery Federation undertakes a quarterly sector comparison which looks at 785 agreements operating in the residential aged-care sector.

The latest comparison reported by the Aged Care Financing Authority, covering the period December 2013 to February 2014, found that for level 1 registered nurses there is a pay difference on average of almost $210 a week, or 17 per cent between those working in aged care and nurses in other areas. Worse, we know that the demand for carers will increase by 40 percent over the next five years. The simple truth is that if we do not act to increase the salaries, training opportunities and career development of aged-care workers, we will have a workforce crisis on our hands at a time when the demand from them keeps on growing.

This government has no plan to address the problems of the aged-care workforce. In fact, one of their first acts in the area of aged care was to try to bypass the parliament and try to axe the workforce supplement through regulation. Again today this short-sighted government is axing the supplement while putting forward no plans to solve the massive problems facing our aged-care workforce into the future. Nor are they doing anything to ensure the funds from the workforce supplement will be redirected toward the vital areas of workforce pay, conditions and development.

But this is not the only area of bad policy from this government when it comes to addressing health sector workforce issues. They have scrapped Health Workforce Australia, which was tasked with ensuring Australia has enough doctors, aged-care workers, nurses and allied health professionals to meet community needs into the future. They also axed the National Workforce Development Fund, which was supporting training and workforce development in the areas of current and future skills needs, and they have provided no solutions as to how the aged-care workforce will be made sustainable into the long-term. In its words, this government pretends to be the best friend of older Australians, but its actions tell a very different story.

This government has an appalling record for delivering to older Australians. They have axed the dementia and severe behaviours supplement with no warning, no consultation and no alternatives offered. This was a $16 supplement paid daily to approved residential aged-care providers caring for people with severe behavioural and psychological symptoms that all too often accompany dementia. Mr Abbott waited until after the May budget to axe the supplement, causing untold financial constraints for aged-care providers who had already prepared their budgets.

We also saw thousands of older Australians thrown into limbo as a result of the government's chaotic mismanagement of income and assets testing arrangements for aged care. This cruel incompetence forced older Australians to wait months before they could enter residential aged care, while Centrelink assessed their accommodation payments level resulting from the introduction of means testing on 1 July. However, it was clear the government did not make sure that Centrelink's systems and processes were able to adequately implement the changes, resulting in incorrect information and massive delays.

The May budget also slugged the aged-care sector with a number of other savage cuts. It slashed the aged-care payroll tax supplement. This supplement was paid to for-profit providers that often exist on wafer-thin profit margins. COTA, the peak body for older Australians, has pointed out that this will see aged-care providers pass on more than $650 million in higher accommodation charges to consumers over the next four years. The changes to pension indexing arrangements, which we all know are just a cut by another name, will also hit the income streams of aged-care providers as the real value of the pension drops by year by year.

And, of course, the Abbott government's cruel and short-sighted GP tax will also hit older Australians disproportionately hard as they are the people most likely to have high healthcare needs. Suddenly, we are hearing that we can't possibly afford proper health, education and support for our citizens. Curiously, however, we still can manage to find billions for slush funds for big polluters and $50,000 cheques for millionaires to have babies. And, while there has been a lot of chest beating, there have been precious few, if any, practical measures to improve government balance sheets by ensuring multinational companies pay their fair share of tax.

Make no mistake: this is a government intent on taking from the young, the poor, the elderly and the vulnerable.