Jill Hall (Shortland, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I will start my contribution on the Aged Care Amendment (2008 Measures No. 2) Bill 2008 by saying that there could not be a greater contrast between the member for Cook’s contribution and the member for Tangney’s contribution to this debate. Whilst the member for Cook did not concentrate exclusively on issues that are included in this legislation, he did give a really good summary of aged care and the issues that confront governments when they are considering aged care.

Firstly I need to put on the record that the responsibility for aged care rests largely with the Commonwealth government. State governments have only a very minor role to play in aged care—that is, building, planning and design, occupational health and safety, food preparation and consumer protection. They are very minor roles. Issues surrounding planning go across both levels of government. As we age, as a community there are many issues that we need to look at in housing for older people. One element of that is included in the legislation before us today: aged-care facilities.

The Aged Care Amendment (2008 Measures No. 2) Bill 2008 puts in place some of the reforms that were earmarked by the Minister for Ageing in her announcement on 22 March 2008 and are part of the Better Protection for Frail Aged Australians reform package that the Rudd government is putting in place. This is part of it; it is not the whole of it. Members of the opposition had 12 years in government to get aged care right. Unfortunately, I would have to give them an F for their efforts in this area.

I have had a longstanding interest in aged care. Some of the most vulnerable people in our society are cared for in aged-care accommodation. The people who live in our high-care and low-care facilities really depend on the government to get it right. If we do not get it right then these vulnerable people are placed at risk. Within my electorate there are some fantastic aged-care providers. In fact, my husband works in the aged-care industry. I know how committed all the providers are to ensuring that their residents have the quality aged care that they deserve.

This bill addresses some inadequacies and maintains effective regulatory safeguards for ensuring high-quality care for the older Australians I am talking about—those frail older people who need to move from their home or from some innovative form of aged care like the previous speaker, the member for Cook, talked about. This bill links approved provider status to the allocation of aged-care places—it directly links that to Commonwealth funding. The bill modernises the current legislation so that it is better aligned with contemporary business practice and applies to all approved providers, regardless of their corporate status. That means that the same rules apply to everyone. It streamlines the assessment of frail older Australians to ensure more timely, consistent and quality assessments. It ensures that any accommodation bonds or like payments by frail older Australians for entry into aged-care services are fully protected under the accommodation guarantee scheme. It makes some minor operational changes to improve the administration of the legislation so it operates more effectively.

I want to touch on some of the elements I have already mentioned. Firstly, I would like to bring to the attention of the House the fact that currently when it comes to aged-care assessments sometimes people wait for a long time to gain entry to aged-care facilities. Within the Shortland electorate the number of people waiting for accommodation has diminished over the last year, but for a very long time people have had to wait an inordinate amount of time to gain entry to either low-care or high-care facilities or aged-care packages.

I will share with the parliament one example. An elderly resident had been waiting for an aged-care package. She had been assessed by an aged-care assessment team. She waited in excess of 12 months to obtain this package. Her assessment ran out and she was left languishing. It was only when my office intervened that we could arrange for another assessment to take place. She had the assessment, which found that within that 18-month period she had gone from needing an aged-care package to actually needing to find accommodation in a high-care aged-care facility.

I think it is imperative that people do have an appropriate ACAT assessment, that they are not subjected to constant ACAT assessments and that they are placed in facilities in a timely manner. That is something that we on this side of the parliament put at the forefront of our aged-care policy: ensuring that people who need the care provided by an aged-care facility can actually obtain that care—and, as I have already said, that has improved considerably over the last 12 months—and ensuring that, once they have obtained that care, they have the proper protections in place.

Over the years the aged-care industry has changed somewhat. Currently, as I think the member for Cook pointed out, older Australians make up 13.4 per cent of the population—that is, 2.8 million or one in seven Australians over the age of 65. By 2050 the Productivity Commission estimates that one in four Australians will be over the age of 65. Shortland electorate is actually ranked the 10th or 11th oldest electorate in Australia and the figure for people over the age of 65 is 18.3 per cent. So I am sure the House can understand my concern in relation to aged care and ensuring that we have quality aged care for all those people who I represent in this parliament. That can best be ensured by making absolutely certain that the legislation that is in place is quality legislation that will ensure the provision of quality aged care.

In 2007 there were around 2,872 residential aged-care providers in Australia. Of these, approximately 61.4 per cent were private not-for-profit, 26.9 per cent were private for-profit and the remaining were government providers. That 26.9 per cent of providers will be made more accountable under this legislation. The setting in 2008 is significantly different to that in 1997, when the original legislation went through the parliament. The industry has matured somewhat and there have been significant changes. The sector has evolved from one-site operators, where you had a private aged-care provider who was operating on one site—it was a cottage industry type approach to aged care—to where there are now multiple services operating from the one site and corporations operating multisite aged-care facilities. As such, the operations have become much more complex from a financial and legal perspective.

This bill before us addresses current legislative inadequacies and maintains effective regulatory safeguards for ensuring high-quality aged care for older Australians. As I mentioned, the change and the developments that have taken place need to be reflected in legislation. This different model of aged care that has emerged is one in which the owner operator, as I have pointed out, quite often has a distinctive role—the owner is not the person on-site operating the facility. So they are very different functions. The regulatory framework has not kept pace with this shift in business practices and there is often a lack of consistency between the regulations and contemporary business practice, which means that regulations have not been applied equally to all providers regardless of their corporate structure.

The shortcomings of the existing framework are varied and they impact upon care providers, care recipients and the broader community. Let us talk about care recipients. They are those frail, older Australians who need to live in one of our aged-care facilities. In moving to those aged-care facilities they need to be sure that the care they receive is of a kind that ensures a good—or as good as possible—quality of life. Once a person lives in an aged-care facility it becomes their home, and that really means that we have to make sure that their life in that home is one such as we would like for our own mothers and fathers. Under the current regulations, there is limited capacity for the Department of Health and Ageing to consider the record of related entities which make decisions about approvals. This unnecessarily and inappropriately limits the ability of the department to make an informed assessment of a company’s records in service delivery and to determine its suitability to be approved to deliver care in the future.

I think this is a very important point. The department must know about the company’s record in service delivery. Unless it has that knowledge it cannot know that the company is suitable to deliver care in the future. Having such knowledge provides better protection for residents and promotes public confidence. Public confidence in the aged-care industry under the last government was, I think, lacking. I quite often had constituents come and raise with me the fact that they did not have that confidence. We need to know who is pulling the financial strings, and that knowledge is not currently available. For the purpose of regulatory scrutiny, we need to know who those key personnel are. This legislation will ensure that that takes place.

At this point I need to emphasise that there are many quality aged-care providers who are accountable. The department does know the makeup of their board and their financial position. I truly believe that that should apply to all operators, and this legislation will ensure that this happens. Increasingly, developers are putting aged-care retirement villages and sometimes disability or step down care all in the same development, giving rise to uncertainty relating to the regulation under the act. We need to ensure that we have maximum knowledge about what is taking place in aged-care facilities, how they all connect and who the key personnel involved in any particular aged-care facilities are.

The other issue that is covered in this legislation relates to accommodation bonds—ensuring that the bonds of people who enter an aged-care facility are fully protected under the aged-care Accommodation Bond Guarantee Scheme and that residents of similar accommodation facilities are accorded protection. Experiences since the introduction of the guarantee scheme in 2006 have highlighted that there are areas where this protection could be stronger. We on this side of the House take our responsibility in that area very seriously.

The aged-care industry involves a number of different people. There are the aged-care providers, there are the workers in the aged-care industry and, of course, there are the people who live in aged-care facilities. The Rudd government believe that we have a responsibility to all those people. We have a responsibility to ensure that we have quality providers—that it is an industry that attracts the right type of provider: people who are prepared to invest in the infrastructure that is needed, in quality staff to work in the industry and in training those quality staff. We also recognise that it is very important to ensure that there are adequate numbers of staff in the industry and that those staff are properly trained and remunerated. And, of course, we need to ensure that the frail aged who enter our aged-care facilities are properly cared for.

The Rudd government will work closely with all the people from all the sectors that are involved in aged care. We will work closely with the providers of aged care, the workers in the aged-care industry and aged-care facility residents and their families. I want to emphasise ‘and their families’ because it is imperative that, if you have a loved one living in an aged-care facility, you have confidence in that aged-care facility. So we make a commitment to the Australian people that they can have that confidence about everyone involved in aged care. This is one of the reforms that have been made that were promised on 22 March 2008. Along with that comes a strengthening of existing police check requirements for people working in the aged-care industry. That is another aspect of ensuring, once again, that people can have confidence in the staff and the aged-care facilities.

Under the previous government we had the Hogan review. Very little came out of the Hogan review. We are more about action and ensuring that we have a viable aged-care sector in Australia. (Time expired)

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