Christopher Pyne (Sturt, Liberal Party, Minister for Ageing) Share this | Hansard source

They have no ideas, as the assistant minister says, to put to the Australian people about what they would do. Every time they are given the opportunity to do so, they squib it. The Leader of the Opposition had the chance on 18 May at a lunch in Queensland for the aged-care industry, which, amazingly, people paid $3,000 a head to attend. People paid $3,000 to hear the Leader of the Opposition at an aged care lunch talk about the Labor Party’s aged care policy! Yet he made no attempt to put to rest their concerns about Labor’s policy in aged care. He did not outline Labor’s agenda for the coming election in aged care. It was just the same lies about ratios and places and spending that we hear constantly from the shadow ministers who cover this area. If I were paying $3,000 to hear the Leader of the Opposition on aged care, I would have thought he would have said something to alleviate and allay my concerns. But no, yet again he squibbed it. The Australian public will have their opportunity at the end of the year to compare our excellent record on aged care with the Labor Party’s record on aged care.

I turn to workforce issues. The Labor Party are Johnny-come-latelies to this debate on the workforce. They think they are the first people to discover that there are workforce challenges in the area of aged care for a whole lot of reasons. It is not a unique issue in Australia that there is a shortage of nurses in aged care and across the health sector. There is a worldwide shortage of nurses, and that affects Australia. So the government has been taking action with respect to the workforce and aged care.

Since 2002, we have created almost 40,000 training places in aged care, 1,600 additional nursing scholarships, 3,200 medication management training places, 13,000 certificate level training places and 12,750 training places for personal care workers from rural and remote regions of Australia. In the budget’s Securing the Future of Aged Care initiative, we provided a further $32 million over five years for 6,000 training places for the community care workforce and 410 postgraduate scholarships. That is almost 40,000 places since 2002, at a cost of over $300 million. So we are definitely recognising the challenges that are there for workforce issues in aged care and we are meeting those challenges. We are not standing still like the Labor Party and wanting to return to the pre-1996 period when aged-care facilities in Australia were, quite frankly, a disgrace and an embarrassment to this country.

You took the necessary action, Madam Acting Deputy Speaker Bishop—if I can be so familiar—that was needed, as the Minister for Ageing. That has been followed up by subsequent ministers for ageing. I am quite proud to have had the opportunity to build on the record and the role that you and others have played in this area, because it is critically important. It is vitally important to the residents that they get the quality and standard of care that you would expect in Australia. We have initiated the processes and framework that have brought that about. It is critically important to the families of those residents that they feel comfortable that their loved ones are in a place where they would be happy to have them, and I think we are achieving that. We also need to maintain a viable industry for the not-for-profit, the for-profit and the government part of that industry, and we are doing that too. I look forward to this bill being passed and the ACFI being introduced in March 2008 because of the benefits that that will bring to the entire sector.

Question agreed to.

Bill read a second time.

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