Shayne Neumann (Blair, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Indigenous Affairs) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

(   There are over 14,000 aged-care nurses, workers, clerks, carers and others in Western Australia who want to know what the Abbott coalition government is going to do with the $1.1 billion in funding the previous Labor government set aside for the workforce supplement in its $3.7 billion Living Longer Living Better package. The Labor government set this funding aside to improve wages, working conditions, training and career paths for some of the nation's lowest paid workers. I challenge the Minister for Social Services to visit WA in any area outside Perth and explain to the aged-care workers how they can afford—or should be able afford—to live on low wages when the price of housing, mortgage payments and rents have risen so steeply. It is callous, cruel and unfair to deny these workers additional wage support, but that is the choice that the Abbott coalition government has made.

It is time to tell the aged-care workers in WA—and, indeed, across Australia—what the coalition government intends to do with $1.1 billion which it stripped out of the aged-care sector in December 2013. Is this funding going to be another victim of the Prime Minister's commission of cuts? I call on the minister to come clean with the workers and providers in the aged-care sectors and with older Western Australian people: will this funding be used constructively to support aged-care workers? Will this funding remain in the sector at all? It is time for the Abbott coalition government to come clean with the aged-care sector and their workers.