Luke Howarth (Petrie, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Aged Care Legislation Amendment (Increasing Consumer Choice) Bill 2016. To begin, I would like to use this opportunity to thank and acknowledge the seniors in my electorate of Petrie for their contribution to Australian society and the great country that they have left people like me and my kids and their kids and grandkids. They really have great stories to tell. I want to acknowledge them and thank them. As Australian seniors, they have contributed so much. Thanks to all of them for their contribution and for sharing their experiences and knowledge with me as I travel around the electorate to retirement villages and aged-care homes.

It is important to talk about aged care. This is quite a complex portfolio, and I do congratulate the Minister for Health and Aged Care, the Hon Sussan Ley, for the work she has already done in making sure the system is easier to navigate. The thing is that Australians are living longer and healthier lives. And that is great. But it is important that, as people age, they have choice about their care. For far too long, people in the aged-care system have been looked upon as one homogeneous group, instead of as individuals.

The Australian government understands that people are individuals and everyone has different needs and wants. The worst thing for someone entering the aged-care system would be to have all their choices taken away from them. This is not what any Australian would want from our aged-care system, and it is why we announced significant reforms to home care in the 2015-16 budget.

From February 2017, funding for a home care package will follow the consumer. This will make it easier for consumers to select a home care provider and to change their provider, should they wish to do so. The current requirement for providers to apply for home care places will be removed, significantly reducing red tape. The changes will give older Australians greater choice in deciding who provides their care and establish a consistent national approach to prioritising access to care.

From July 2018, the government intends to integrate the Home Care Packages Program and the Commonwealth Home Support Program into a single care-at-home program to simplify the way services are delivered and funded.

The Aged Care Legislation Amendment (Increasing Consumer Choice) Bill 2016 expands on the reform we announced in last year's budget. It makes amendments to the act and the transitional provisions act to enable funding for a home care package to follow the care recipient. This means the care recipient will be able to direct the home care funding to a provider of their choice. Home care places will no longer be allocated to an approved provider in respect of a particular location or region. The amendments will create a consistent national process for prioritising access to subsidised home care.

The amendments will also simplify the approval process for approved providers. The legislative criteria used to assess the suitability of a person to become an approved provider will be streamlined. This will also provide for a simplified process for residential care and flexible care providers to become approved providers of home care. An organisation's approval to provide home care will commence as soon as the approval is granted and will not lapse. Currently, approved provider status lapses after two years if the provider does not hold an allocation of places. The lapsing provision will be removed across all care types—home care, residential care and flexible care.

For the first time, there will also be a consistent national approach to prioritising access to home care through the My Aged Care gateway, the entry point to the aged-care system. This option will increase choice, flexibility and portability for the consumer. It will reduce the regulatory burden for providers and provide a nationally consistent approach. Removing the concept of allocated home care places will enable the sector to transition to a more competitive, market-driven environment and allow consumer focused and innovative providers to expand their businesses to meet local demand and consumer expectations.

Too often I have been approached by families in my electorate whose relatives—parents or grandparents—have been waiting many months for an aged-care place. Some had been waiting years. And this places a lot of stress on the family—particularly if their loved one, their mother or father or even grandparents have an illness. How does it affect those people if they are working full time and raising children of their own? It does place a lot of stress on them. This bill will help alleviate that.

The last years of your life, when you looking to go into aged care, are not years that anyone would want to spend in limbo. This is not the time to put pressure or stress on people—especially if they are suffering from a chronic illness like arthritis or dementia. I am glad that seniors in my electorate will have more choice and will be able to access aged care more efficiently.

I also want to thank the workers in the aged-care industry. As I have moved around my electorate of Petrie, visiting different aged-care facilities, I have got to meet some of the workers. They do a wonderful job for seniors. They care for them in ways that I could not, and they do so with love and interest. My father actually works in aged care. He works as a handyman at a local aged-care facility just outside my electorate, fixing up trolleys and wheelchairs. He does not do it for the money; he does it because he enjoys doing it—using his hands. But he tells me that he often spends quite a bit of time just talking to the residents in the aged-care facility and that they really appreciate that, because not everybody is blessed to have family that can visit them and so forth, and people are often looking for a good chat. I am sure members on both sides of the House who have been into aged-care facilities would say the same thing when they visit senior Australians.

I want to say to people in my electorate too that if they are looking to find a place for their parents or their grandparents then they can visit the website, www.myagedcare.gov.au, which provides all the information on all the services that they would need—where to find those services and other relevant information for their families and for elderly Australians. Again, I congratulate the minister, and I commend this bill to the House.

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