David Gillespie (Lyne, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

Aged care is a huge industry and a very vital part of Australian life—caring for our nearest and dearest in their twilight years. It's a huge industry and it's under huge financial pressure. Many have seen reports in the aged-care literature that up to half of the aged-care facilities around the country are relying on their retained earnings from over 20 and 30 years to keep them in the black. That is very sad. But that's why we, in the coalition, when we were in government, made huge improvements in aged care. Everyone is on the unity ticket; we want the best for our older citizens. But I want to put some things on the record after I've made some comments about the Aged Care Amendment (Implementing Care Reform) Bill 2022.

Schedule 1, which is about having compulsory RNs onsite 24 hours a day, seven days a week, is going to be very problematic. I see the sentiment, and the government in the last term supported the concept but saw that there is a huge shortage of RNs in country areas, let alone RNs to staff, onsite, 24 hours a day. There are many small facilities that are actually closing wards at the moment because they don't have RNs to be onsite, even intermittently. It will be a huge burden for many of my rural and remote providers—and even my larger providers that have 300 and 400 people. They just can't get nurses. But in the last budget, we put a whole lot of money in to retain the workforce and keep them in the industry—hundreds of millions of dollars. We've got workforce retention bonuses. We've got training in occupational therapy and aged-care nursing happening in rural and remote nursing homes—all those things and a 14-point plan to grow the aged-care workforce. But more about that later.

The other thing to talk about is the exemption for the registered nurse requirement. I would like to know more of the details. Is this going to be a get-out-of-jail card so that places don't close? I think you'll find, whatever the exemption is written up for, they'll be flooded with people requesting exemptions. I have got concerns about whether there'll be penalties, or will aged-care facilities actually close as a result of that? I'm not saying it's not a good idea; I'm just saying the practicalities of it will be very difficult.

The issue about capping fees in home care is a very welcome development. The former Minister for Senior Australians, Stephen Colbeck, and the former Minister for Aged Care, Greg Hunt, were aware of some of the problems with price-gouging in the home-care space. A lot of the regulations to cap fees are fully supported by us because they were going to be done as part of the work-up for the Australian National Aged Care Classification system—the AN-ACC system—that's coming in to replace the ACFI. Just to put in perspective what they achieved, aged care was on a $13.2 billion annual budget from the federal government in 2013 when we assumed responsibility on the Treasury benches and government. When we lost office, it was up to $30 billion—that's per year. There's an extra $18.9 billion plus another $200,000 for workforce supplements in the ACFI changeover to AN-ACC, the basic daily fee supplements, the homelessness supplement, the viability supplement, the loading for rural and the loading for remote. There was so much good work done, and I'm really pleased to see this coming in, but please don't let people think that none of this was done in the former government and that it just appeared miraculously at the change of government. This was worked up for several years. We delivered huge improvements, and there's a lot more to go because aged care is so important for our senior Australians.

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