Anika Wells (Lilley, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Aged Care) Share this | Hansard source

We estimate that about 80 per cent of the facilities across Australia already fulfil or nearly fulfil that requirement for 24/7 nurses, so we are focused 110 per cent on the 20 per cent of facilities that are not yet fulfilling the 24/7 nursing requirement. We need to lift up the standard of care across the country that was neglected for nine years under the previous government, and I note this new-found interest in 24/7 nurses. The previous government could not find within themselves to support that in the Senate in the 46th Parliament. The bill that we put through the House yesterday morning would have gone through but for their inability to support 24/7 nurses. So now they ask me how I'm going to deliver something that they could not do themselves, despite the fact that in the Senate they had the ability in budget week, in the dying days of the Morrison government. One of the very last things they could have done was legislate 24/7 nurses for older Australians across the country, but they didn't. You didn't! So now we will.

In the first 100 days we have commenced that legislative process. We are working with providers to make sure that everybody will have those nurses so that come 1 July next year every single older Australian will know that they will have access to a nurse when they need it in their facility, across the country. We will do that in tandem with our friends in the industrial movement, who are helping us move forward, and with our friends in the community and providers association, who are working with us to make sure that people in regional and rural areas and people in remote areas can access nurses and have the exemptions and support that they need to do that.

I am pleased and proud that this side of the House understands the importance of that. I am heartened by the question. It suggests that there might have been a turnaround in your approach, but I note that we would not be in this position—being forced to address these workforce shortages—if you'd done anything in the past nine years to take aged-care reform seriously. (Time expired)

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