Andrew Laming (Bowman, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Apologies to all in Australia who are listening in to the debate today for the last 15 minutes of debate; that is 15 minutes many of us will never get back. If we were to distil what happened in the last quarter of an hour, most of us would agree that we could pretty much sum up the debate right now and just have a vote.

I want to repudiate a couple of inaccuracies that snuck through in that 15 minutes for those of you who did not fall asleep. The first is that this payment of $1.1 billion—which was effectively used as a union recruitment tool in aged care—will be in full and 100 per cent repurposed into the aged-care funding pool. The indexation of 2.4 per cent that accrues in the aged-care sector is recognised to have occurred early this year. This repurposing of the payment we are debating today is over and above indexation. It is a very clear message to Australians out there in aged-care facilities that the money is fully available to providers now, and they will not be told how to spend it.

It must be very difficult being a member of the Labor Party when uttering the phrase 'pay and conditions, pay and conditions' continues to get you preselected, but takes you no closer to the heart of the economics of running an aged-care facility. It is only one lever, and you cannot keep pressing the pay and conditions lever and ignore everything else—partly because that might be your ideological choice and partly because the economics of aged care is a little bit too complex. It is much easier, in that context, to pay a workforce supplement to try to push up wages and not worry about the ancillary effects that flow from that.

In reality, for those of us who run a small, medium-sized or big business, or a hospital, an aged-care facility or anything in between, we know there are numerous inputs that control the quality of what we create. That is, of course, the service. Looking after our seniors is not just about who pays what salary; it is actually about the technology we deliver to ensure that work is of the highest quality. It is about the training we impart so that those who work in our services are as effective as possible. Lastly, it is about the managerial decisions that ensure that over the long term the service is viable.

Wages are just one input. It is the Labor Party input that occupies every preselection debate and that they come and stand in this chamber to talk about, but we know it is way more complex than that. When we pay for good people and we get the best people that we can within the market, we then have a broader concern about the quality of the service that is delivered and the use of technology, and of course those labour to capital ratios. And that is a far broader debate that aged-care facilities are thinking about. What they know is that they get all of that money and more, they get the indexation and they have more flexibly about how that money is spent.

We know that in regional and rural areas occupancy may not always be at the same high levels and, potentially, there can be fluctuations in service requirements—and if you cannot get services in that town or to get them you have to pay more then, in many cases, viability really can be quite threatening in those situations. Fifty-four million dollars of viability payments is a very important contribution to make sure that Australian seniors can retire and have aged-care facilities in the towns where they have grown up, where they have worked and where they have given their lives. That is very important. I also note many seniors from regional areas, in a very dispersed population like Brisbane's, increasingly come down to outer metropolitan areas to find aged-care places. That puts an enormous stress on our services to respond to those demands.

Thirdly, in this series of minor, technical and consequential amendments, there is an arrangement to ensure that costs can be recovered from people who have care at home, as they can be with residential care. That makes complete sense, and it is only fair to treat people who have at-home care in the same way as those who have residential care.

Lastly, and with some credit to the previous government for embarking on the My Aged Care website and the services that have been provided, there is the acknowledgement that it will be stepping up in the middle of next year and that individuals will be able to develop their own personal aged-care profiles. That makes complete sense and is consistent with the move, that we are having in both health and hospital provision, increasingly to not only collect data but also make sure that that data is available, because if you cannot mine the data and use it then the great threat is that that data, having been so expensive, is not at all utilised. I know that there is significant work now occurring in the US—led by GE, no less—to effectively form control towers around the management of health and hospital data. At the moment, we have a highly reactive hospital and aged-care system. We set our staffing ratios weeks in advance; we wait, often unable to predict patient flows and arrivals; and we have the 5 o'clock referral from aged-care facilities to hospitals when staff there are not confident that they can look after complex and high-needs patients over a weekend when staffing levels and experience are sometimes lower. We need to plan for that in advance. We need a highly intelligent system that could pull together multiple forms of information in health and aged care. I think that forming these profiles in the My Aged Care website is one way of doing that.

Keep in mind that a hospital and an aged-care facility are very complex environments. You have your staff flow, patient flow, use of consumables, and staff time in individual tasks. At the moment we have a very slowly responsive system that cannot actually respond when required to changes in that system, leading to blockages—obstruction within the system—and, ultimately, poor functionality. So whether it is in outpatients or whether it is an individual patient record, or whether it is in aged care with our own profile, we are determined to help Australians through that sometimes very traumatic time of finding a suitable aged-care place. It is something that the coalition government is committed to.

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