Nick Champion (Wakefield, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise this evening to support the Social Security Legislation Amendment (Improved Support for Carers) Bill 2009. In these tough times we have to acknowledge the enormous contribution and sacrifice that carers make to our society and acknowledge that it is amplified by these times. In tough times the vulnerable often do it the toughest. In Australia we are most fortunate to have an army of carers and everyday heroes who dedicate their lives to caring for a loved one. This care is often extremely demanding, and the stories that many of my constituents have told me are often very moving. The value of carers to our society cannot be described in simple economic terms; it is a testament to the power of people’s love and compassion for one another. Caring is often the result of unconditional love and that love, by its nature, often involves great sacrifice on behalf of the carer. That is why the government is committed to this legislative response to the Carer Payment (child) Review Taskforce recommendations, and the bill before the House today will see many of these recommendations implemented in time for the new financial year. This review was commissioned by the previous government, and they are to be commended for doing so. We hope that all those opposite will endorse its findings and support this bill.

It is important to consider how the carer payment system currently works. At the moment, eligibility for the carer payment is determined by reference to a very strict criteria, including that the child cared for must meet the very restrictive legislative definition of a profoundly disabled child, the care provided must be constant and must be provided in a private residence in the home of the care receiver, and the carer must not be participating in employment or other specified activities for more than 25 hours a week. The effect of those restrictions often means that many carers can access only the carer allowance, which is used by some families as an income supplement but does not cover the real costs of caring for a disabled child. Strict criteria basically means excessive bureaucracy, excessive red tape, in people’s lives and it often means that many deserving people miss out, are overlooked or simply do not apply.

My office, like those of many MPs, has assisted many such people to get through the process. One of those was a lady named Chris who lives and works in my electorate. She cares for her severely intellectually and physically disabled child. Because of those administrative difficulties in the current system, she contacted my office to get assistance with Centrelink to ensure that she continued to get the carer payment for caring for her child with special needs. Centrelink had determined that her daughter’s hearing impairment had improved to the point that Chris no longer qualified for the carer payment, and with the assistance of my office she was able to go through the appeals process and get re-entitled to it. The fact that the system gave it to her, took it away from her and then gave it to her again only after a lot of toing and froing shows how the inflexibility and restrictiveness of the system puts people through a bureaucratic mill. I do not think that that is particularly fair or particularly reasonable or even particularly economically efficient.

These amendments will help mothers like Chris and will prevent these sorts of situations from occurring. The department estimates that around 19,000 more carers will have access to the carer payment from 1 July 2009. That is 19,000 people who are really deserving of these payments, who did not get them in the past because the previous assessment scheme was unfair, made peoples lives unnecessarily difficult and put them through the bureaucratic wringer. The bill before the House today changes all that. It puts in place a new and fairer set of criteria, which are much more similar to the carer payment (adult) criteria based on the care required, and reflect the functional ability of the care receiver rather than on rigid medical standards.

Another key recommendation of the review was in regard to access to the carer payment for short-term or episodic needs. Currently, both the carer payment (child) and the carer allowance (child) provide for situations where it is anticipated that the need for care will be ongoing. But, with life being difficult and complex and a bit of a mosaic, care is not always ongoing and the costs of care are not always constant. This bill designs a system of financial assistance to cope with emergencies that will prove invaluable to parents across the country. There will be much more generous arrangements for carers who have children in hospital, and the qualification rules for the tragic situation of people caring for children with terminal illnesses will also be relaxed. That is a very important thing. We do not want to make people’s lives any more difficult or stressful in those sorts of situations. We want to make the government a great help and great enabler so that people can assist their children when they are in hospital. There is nothing, I think, more distressing than a child in hospital.

Under this new system a person in receipt of a carer payment in respect of a child will also become automatically eligible for the carer allowance. Administration of these claims will be improved, with better claims processing and a capacity for the more complex claims to be handled by a claims assessment team. That is a really important thing. One of the constant complaints to my office about Centrelink is that people end up lost in a bureaucratic maze. Often the complexity of many of the forms and procedures of Centrelink can be somewhat confusing for members of parliament, so they could tend to be pretty confusing for citizens as well. Having a dedicated team to help people in this situation, to help get assessment quickly and efficiently, is a really good thing.

These changes, of course, come on the back of the government’s extended support last year for carers. In 2008 we provided $1,000 to carer payment recipients, and carer allowance recipients also received $600 for every person in their care. That was followed by the Economic Security Strategy that provided $1,400 for carer payment recipients and $1,000 for carer allowance recipients for each person cared for. There are, of course, the budget announcements on top of that. That is a really good record of the government for supporting carers and their children over the last 18 months.

Of course supporting carers and their children in their home environment is only one part of a policy that truly recognises the importance of carers. The government realises that supporting carers means providing infrastructure support for Australians with different needs and so has also set aside some $100 million for supported accommodation facilities. These facilities will be able to care for people whose ageing parents can no longer care for them at home. This issue was raised with me in Smithfield Plains. I had a concerned father talk to me at a street corner meeting. His No. 1 concern was that he was frightened about what would happen to his adult disabled child when he and his wife passed away. If people are prepared to get up early on a Saturday morning in winter to come and see a local political candidate about this issue, you know it is important to them; and it is important that their view and concern is presented in this parliament and in this bill. So I think these measures are a measure of this parliament’s commitment to supporting carers and their families. The bill includes $273 million worth of measures. That is just one part of the government’s plan—but a very important part of that plan.

We want to make sure that these reforms are passed by the parliament. They reflect the community’s expectation that we should have compassion and should support those people like Chris and like that father who came to see me on that cold winter morning. They do an amazing job, work very hard, keep smiling and do what all good parents do—which is to love their children unconditionally. This bill is about acknowledging that unconditional love and sacrifice in a small way by removing some of the unnecessary administrative injustices from the system. I commend the bill to the House.

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