John Murphy (Lowe, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary to the Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Hansard source

by leave—I would like to congratulate my friend and colleague the Hon. Peter Slipper, member for Fisher and Chair of the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Legal and Constitutional Affairs, on his management and leadership of this committee during this parliament. It was an unalloyed pleasure working with you, and on behalf of my Labor colleagues I particularly thank you for your bipartisan approach to the work of the committee over the past three years, which stands in stark contrast to your predecessor’s conduct during the 40th Parliament.

I also congratulate the committee secretary, Ms Joanne Towner; the inquiry secretary, Dr Nicholas Horne; the principal research officer, Dr Mark Rodrigues; and the staff of the legal and constitutional affairs committee secretariat for their tireless and cheerful service to the committee and the outstanding quality of their work. No parliamentary committee could wish for a better secretariat than the one that we have enjoyed during this parliament.

This inquiry, as the chairman mentioned, went for more than a year, and our report is very, very timely in our history with the challenges facing our nation in relation to the ageing population. It is sobering that within the next 40 years approximately a quarter of Australia’s population will be aged 65 years or more. This places a great demand on all of us in this place to make sure that we get the law right in a bipartisan way to ensure that we look after the frail and some of the most vulnerable members of our community, the elderly.

As the chairman said, our committee received submissions from a broad cross-section of interested groups and individuals and the committee travelled right around Australia, taking a wide and diverse range of evidence from some very good witnesses. The exhaustive work of the committee is a monument indeed to both the chairman’s and the secretariat’s level of endurance. I was not able to go right around Australia but I did manage to get to Perth, and that was certainly a great experience. Well done to the committee.

I support what the chairman has said in relation to those 48 amendments. I would particularly like to highlight something from my experience of hearing evidence in Perth in relation to retirement villages. I would like to draw the attention of those interested in this report to chapter 7 and to highlight the issues that came out of retirement villages, namely the complex nature of contracts, fees and charges, misleading advertising and the lack of low-cost and speedy dispute resolution mechanisms. I would also like to highlight the recommendation that the ‘simplification and standardisation of retirement village contracts could assist older people to make better informed decisions about their accommodation options’. I will not go into detail but I draw attention to one witness, Mr Robert Boyne, who appeared before us. His comments at paragraph 7.17 on page 208 of the report really highlight just how complex those contracts can be and how difficult it is for some of the residents to understand them.

But, in concluding, it was a great inquiry. Thanks once again to you, Peter, for the very great bipartisan way you conducted yourself on this inquiry, as you have over the last three years with this committee. It has been a pleasure to work with you.

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