Joanne Ryan (Lalor, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I'm pleased to rise in support of the Aged Care Bill 2024, which is in response to the Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety findings. The bill delivers on our election commitment to fix aged care. The royal commission passed down 148 recommendations for aged-care reforms: 136 have been addressed since the tabling of the report in 2021; 94 have been addressed by the Albanese Labor government since coming to office. This bill responds directly to recommendations from the royal commission into aged care and will address 58 recommendations in total. The bill will build on the aged-care reforms already put in place by the Albanese government. This includes $11.3 billion committed for aged-care workers to receive a 15 per cent pay rise. This is to make our aged-care workers feel valued by our community and to demonstrate their value, to demonstrate that, as Australians, we appreciate the value of the work that they do. And it ensures that the community understands the importance of the work they do.

We've improved the quality of aged care. We've seen nurses put back into aged-care facilities. We've seen improvements in nutrition rates. We've seen reductions in some of the behaviours that were highlighted in the aged-care royal commission. In that report we read about some of the terrible things happening in aged care. That interim report was titled Neglect, and for all those here in this place during the royal commission that pretty much sums up what we were seeing across our aged-care sector. Residential aged care has seen an additional 3.9 million minutes of care from registered nurses since the Albanese government took office.

The Aged Care Bill 2024 is a $5.6 billion package that will improve the way services are delivered to older Australians by providing them with support to live independently and with dignity as they age. At this point, I would like to thank the opposition for their bipartisan support in this process to get to this point, their support for the task force and for the measures in this bill. A statement of rights for older people and a positive statement of duty for providers will uphold and outline the rights of older people in the aged-care system and guides how workers and organisations must behave and make decisions under the new laws. It includes a single entry point to the aged-care system with clear eligibility requirements and a fair, culturally safe assessment process which brings together the different assessment services into a single system, which makes it easier for Australians to access and enter.

The framework for delivery of a range of aged-care services, including residential care, includes $4.3 billion in a new system of home care, the Support at Home program, which will replace My Aged Care, to support older Australians to stay in their home and in the community they love for longer. We'll have improved access to assistive technology and financial assistance to modify homes to make them safe, and we'll see 1.4 million older Australians benefit by 2035.

The Aged Care Bill means we'll have fair contributions from those who can afford to contribute to the cost of their aged care to make sure the aged-care system is sustainable into the future, but ensuring that the government takes responsibility for all clinical care, and mechanisms for the Commonwealth to find aged-care services, including aged-care related grant programs to providers. It has a new approach, regulating aged care which will balance explicit incentives for continuous improvement and high-quality care, including through new quality standards, stronger regulatory powers to protect people from harm and a new ministerially appointed complaints commissioner and whistleblower protections to make sure older people, workers and others have clear pathways to raise concerns about the quality of aged-care services. I know how important those provisions in this bill are for communities like mine. I know people will feel safer and will trust the system more readily knowing that those provisions are in place and knowing that there is a complaints commissioner.

We all lived through the behaviours that led to the royal commission and we heard about the conditions in many aged-care services during the royal commission. Of course, we then had the pandemic and the utter devastation that that meant for a lot of families. In my electorate, that was acute and critical. We lost a lot of our older community members during COVID in aged care, and I know that families would have welcomed, at that point, a complaints commissioner. They would have welcomed whistleblower protections because in parts of my community which are connected to particular aged-care services, they were ringing me—for me to be that complaints commissioner, if you like. Staff members working in the sector were doing similar. They were contacting people as much as they could to blow the whistle about what was potentially happening in our aged-care centres during COVID. We know that, once the infections were in place in facilities, they were very difficult to contain, and we know that that led to an enormous amount of angst and grief.

Several principles will underpin these new reforms. Australians will get the support they need and make a reasonable contribution according to their means, as the taskforce recommended. Everyone already in residential and home care will benefit from a no-worse-off principle based on their place in the system. The government will pay all clinical-care costs, with individuals contributing to the kinds of costs they would typically pay throughout their lives. The government will continue to pay for the majority of aged-care costs. The taskforce that was put together has looked at our system and how we might improve it. It has looked at the recommendations from the royal commission and has brought together and consulted widely with older Australians, their advocates, unions, providers and other experts.

The interim report by the Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety was titled Neglect, as I said. The first chapter of the report was titled 'A Shocking Tale of Neglect' and it did just that. It told a shocking tale of how the former government allowed Australians to be disrespected, neglected and basically forgotten. This bill puts in place measures, with support from those opposite, to ensure that we don't see that fragmented system repeated. It was a fragmented system that was poorly managed, unsupported and underfunded, and which saw our older people, who are very often vulnerable people, neglected, isolated and powerless in an uncaring and unkind system that did not deliver uniformly safe and quality care. This legislation tries to ensure the system that we're talking about is no longer fragmented. The aim of the government and the aim of the sector is to ensure that we're providing quality aged care.

There's a temptation to always want to look back when we're talking about aged care to what were very dark days and what were very dark scenes. But I am feeling really positive about the changes already made to the aged-care sector under this government. I am feeling really positive that post pandemic our aged-care system has recovered and renewed itself. When I visit the aged-care centres in my electorate, I find people working in the sector committed to quality care for the people they're caring for, and I find my residents in aged care happy when I visit and speaking in glowing terms, as they always were, about the people who are paid to care for them. That was always the case.

One of the key changes here that need to be considered, though, is the package around the new Support at Home program, because this is critical. We know that people would prefer to stay in their own homes for as long as they can, and this package will go a long way to supporting people to progressively make that choice. It's an important program. I lived the My Aged Care program with my own mother. The Commonwealth provided assistance for her to stay independent for as long as she did, and I know that this new version will be even better in supporting people at home to stay at home longer. Part of that is around the assessment process being a single entry point and not having to tell your circumstances or the story of your life over and over again to multiple people. That assessment, once made, can then be progressively reviewed. The Support at Home program will mean that people's clinical needs are met at home.

It is important work that is being done to bring this legislation forward and to create an environment where aged-care workers are feeling respected and valued. This is a sector that was under considerable pressure, both financial and in terms of public perception. It's important that the work that's been done across the last 2½ years had the sector at the table, prepared to embrace the new provisions, because it means that we can all move forward now with a view to our older Australians being cared for in a way that will leave us able to sleep at night, bluntly—because there were moments during the pandemic when that was certainly a struggle for me and for many in my community.

I'd like to pay tribute to Minister Wells for the work that she has done in preparing this. I'd like to thank all members of the taskforce for their work, under difficult circumstances, in coming together to reshape this sector and have a look at how it might be improved under this government. I'd like to again thank the opposition and the crossbench for the way that we've worked together to ensure that this is done in a bipartisan way.

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