Andrew Gee (Calare, National Party, Assistant Minister to the Deputy Prime Minister) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I present the explanatory memorandum to this bill and move:

That this bill be now read a second time.

Today I am proud to introduce the Aged Care Legislation Amendment (New Commissioner Functions) Bill 2019, which builds on this government's commitment to ensure older Australians in the aged-care system are better cared for. This bill gives additional regulatory functions and powers to the independent Aged Care Quality and Safety Commissioner, fulfilling the government's 2018-19 budget announcement.

The government established the Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission on 1 January 2019, bringing together the functions of the Australian Aged Care Quality Agency and the Aged Care Complaints Commissioner. The commission's initial responsibilities for complaints resolution and the accreditation, assessment and monitoring of aged-care services will now be expanded.

From 1 January 2020, the commissioner will be responsible for:

These additional functions build on the existing functions of the commissioner and ensure the commission is the primary point of contact for senior Australians and their families to raise concerns and ask questions about the quality of their aged care, knowing the commission is empowered to respond.

The transfer of these regulatory functions from the Secretary of the Department of Health to the commissioner is a fundamental strengthening of the regulation of the aged-care sector.

The commissioner will now have the ability to approve providers' entry into aged care, stronger powers to monitor the quality of the care they provide and a broader remit to oversee and enforce their compliance with all aged-care responsibilities.

If a provider is not providing the care required and expected of them, the commissioner will be empowered to impose sanctions to protect care recipients, including revoking their approval to participate in the Commonwealth subsidised market.

The amendments in the bill also streamline the process for the commissioner to impose sanctions on aged-care providers found not to be complying with their responsibilities and failing to make a sufficient response to the identified noncompliance.

Providers will continue to be expected to cooperate with the commission, and officers of the commission will be able to seek a warrant in order to exercise their powers where providers fail to cooperate.

The commission will also have additional powers to seek information from providers related to their suitability to provide aged care and how they look after the funds that care recipients contribute to the cost of their care.

At the same time, the bill ensures the secretary and the department have the necessary powers to continue to administer funding arrangements which will remain under the Aged Care Act from 1 January 2020.

Although the Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety is still underway and we cannot anticipate any recommendations that will come from it, these reforms provide a basis upon which to consider them and demonstrate that the government is listening to concerns being raised.

These reforms are the second stage of our direct response to Ms Kate Carrell and Professor Ron Paterson's findings and recommendations of the Review of National Aged Care Regulatory Process undertaken in 2017.

The first stage occurred on 1 January this year with the establishment of the commission and appointment of Ms Janet Anderson as commissioner. I would like to thank Janet for the work she and her team have done this year to protect and enhance the safety, health, well-being and quality of life of people receiving aged care by implementing the government's reforms, and building the new commission.

But there is more to do. There continues to be failures of care and older Australians deserve to be safe and well looked after in their homes, whether that's in residential aged care or their own home. We should rightfully expect that those responsible for failures will be held to account.

This bill demonstrates the government's commitment to continue to strengthen the aged-care regulatory framework in response to these challenges.

Julie Collins (Franklin, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Ageing and Seniors) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

by leave—As the minister has outlined, the Aged Care Legislation Amendment (New Commissioner Functions) Bill 2019 does provide for the transfer, function and powers from the Department of Health to the Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission. Unfortunately, the minister has said that it confers new powers; it does not. The department already holds these powers, and it is actually a missed opportunity not to give the new commission that started on 1 January this year some additional powers.

Specifically, we think that the government should have done more to ensure transparency around funding and to ensure more around the complaints mechanisms and outcomes of complaints and give the commission more powers to arbitrate when people make a complaint about what is happening in aged care in Australia today. This government has continually said that it is doing things to fix the aged-care system, but it has been very, very slow and is certainly not good enough.

The report that recommended some of these things the government is moving in this bill is more than two years old. It is not good enough for the government to come in here and say: 'We've done enough. We've got a royal commission on, and we're not going to do anything else'. We need to implement the royal commission's interim recommendations which the government says it's done, but of course it only provided 10,000 new home-care packages when we still have 120,000 older Australians waiting on that waitlist.

We know that the government could be doing more in terms of all the other recommendations that it has sitting on its desk today. We know that major reform is going to be required when we get the final recommendations from this royal commission. It was quite difficult to sit and listen to the Prime Minister in question time today, trying to pretend that we have said no to bipartisanship. I've been offering bipartisanship now for more than three years when it comes to aged care.

Unfortunately, this government is not doing enough. We are not going to let older Australians down on this side of the House by sitting back and letting the government get away with not doing enough. We are not going to sit here quietly and be quiet, if the government is not doing enough because that will be failing older Australians. I'm not going to sit by and allow the government to continually fail older Australians.

Whilst we support this bill, we wanted to see more from the government. There should've been more from the government, and here we are on the eve of the parliament getting up for the year, more than two years after the government had this report. I sincerely hope it doesn't take them more than two years to implement the royal commission's recommendations.

Question agreed to.

Bill read a second time.