Jane Prentice (Ryan, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

There is a key principle at the heart of forward-thinking governments that also better positions the management capacity of the governments that follow to deal with emerging challenges. Failing to plan is planning to fail. For Australia, this is particularly true when it comes to old age and retirement. While most people want to grow old in their own home, in the neighbourhood they know and within easy reach of their family and friends and the community centred support networks that have grown around them, sometimes our elderly, unwell and frail family and friends need a level of care that can only be delivered in care facilities or a nursing home. The electorate of Ryan has 13 various homes and care facilities.

One of the biggest challenges Australia faces is how we are going to house, service and look after our ageing population. The latest Intergenerational report, for example, showed life expectancy was currently 91.5 years for men and 93.6 years for women but this would increase to 95.1 years for men and 96.6 years for women in 2054-55. And there is reason to expect that some of us will still be around: about 4.9 per cent of the population, or nearly two million Australians, will be aged 85 and over in just 40 years.

While our aged-care system is world class, people are living longer as a result of better health and better care. We need to make some fundamental changes now to ensure the system is more sustainable and affordable in the future. The coalition government is working to ensure the sustainability of aged care is not put at risk, ensuring that we will be able to provide quality care for older Australians now and into the future. The Australian government provides aged-care funding for residential aged care and a range of community care services, including care in the home.

It is encouraging that those opposite agree with us that there will always be a safety net and that people who can afford to contribute to the cost of their aged care should do so. The changes we are implementing today are designed to make the aged-care system more sustainable, more efficient, more flexible and easier to access and navigate. Moving towards consumer directed care is a big part of the changes we are making to the aged-care system that mean people will have greater choice and care will be based on needs.

As I said at the start of my contribution, failing to plan is planning to fail. The 2015 Intergenerational report shows how Australia may change over the next 40 years. While it projects that income growth will slow, it also shows that Australia can continue to prosper by making the best of our circumstances and opportunities, including by reforming the tax system to promote jobs, growth and opportunity. We need to do whatever we can to rein in unnecessary costs that are built into the aged-care system today in order to make services more affordable sooner, while helping create the most agile, innovative and affordable aged-care sector for future generations. I congratulate the Minister for Aged Care for recognising this and, more importantly, for doing something about it.

Australian government expenditure on aged care has nearly quadrupled since 1975. And, as a result of the increase in the number of people aged over 70, expenditure is projected to nearly double again as a share of the economy within 40 years. In effect, expenditure is projected to increase from 0.9 per cent of GDP in 2014-15 to 1.7 per cent of GDP in 2054-55. This is an increase from $620 to $2,000 in real, per person terms. When looking at the big challenges facing the Australian government, it is generally a good idea to have a look at the legacy of previous governments.

In this context, it is worth recalling that when the Rudd-Gillard governments came to office, Labor inherited a surplus of $20 billion with no net debt and $45 billion in the bank. When the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd government left office six years later, it left in its wake 200,000 more unemployed, gross debt projected to rise to $667 billion, $123 billion in cumulative deficits, the world's biggest carbon tax and a mountain of job-destroying red and green tape. If no action had been taken on Labor's reckless spending commitments, within a decade our interest repayments would have been $3 billion a month. Clearly, there is a need to rein in Labor's debt and do whatever we can to grow the economy and create jobs.

Excessive red tape can detract from productivity and ultimately lower the standard of living of all Australians. I welcome the Aged Care Amendment (Red tape Reduction in Places Management) Bill 2015 as just one more step forward in our government's deregulation reform agenda. There are significant costs for business associated with various government laws, regulations, licences, approvals processes and compliance—on top of all the various government taxes, fees and charges. While there is always a role for government to set quality standards and protections for consumers, too often the process loses its sense of purpose and grows at a disproportionate cost for service providers. This unnecessary cost—the cost of government red and green tape—is then passed onto the consumer as higher priced goods and services.

Boosting productivity and reducing the burden of regulation is crucial to making Australian businesses, entrepreneurs and workers better off, while also helping drive down the cost of services for consumers. On this side of the House, we believe government should be an enabler. Sometimes the best thing we can do to make more services more affordable and more accessible for more of those who need it is for government to do less. The amendments in this bill aim to reduce red tape in aged-care places management by better aligning the current business realities of approved providers and removing the need for them to seek approval to transfer residential/home care and flexible aged-care places to another approved provider. This bill goes some way to chipping away at the mountain of red tape Labor left in the aged-care sector and is consistent with the coalition's commitment to reduce red tape by $l billion a year.

There was an identified need to reduce the red tape burden on approved providers to enable and support more efficient and effective management of aged-care places. I commend the minister for dealing with this issue in this bill and I commend the bill to the House.

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