Gary Humphries (ACT, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I also want to speak on the Aged Care (Bond Security) Bill 2005 and related bills—but at a little less length than Senator McLucas did, mainly because I will actually address the bills rather than the extraneous issues that Senator McLucas raised. First, I want to make it clear that the government deserves to be commended for a quite extraordinary achievement with this package of legislation.

These bills address the potential for a very serious crisis in aged accommodation in Australia. With hundreds of millions of dollars of accommodation bonds being held by thousands of providers across the country, the potential for those providers to default in their obligations to their residents’ estates is quite significant. There are some providers who operate a large number of homes in this country, and if one of them were to enter into serious financial difficulty—heaven forbid—and a default occurred, there would be a very significant loss to perhaps tens of thousands of people. It is true to say that that has not occurred before. In fact, the Senate Community Affairs Legislation Committee heard that there was no evidence of any default in the obligation to repay accommodation bonds in Australia. Nonetheless, the potential remains.

With these bills, the government has put in place a scheme which will, for the first time, address that potential disaster in the industry. The scheme has obtained more or less unanimous support from the industry, notwithstanding the fact that the proposed regime will potentially place a significant obligation on providers in the industry to foot the bill in the event that there is a default by one or more other providers in the industry. Given the complexity of the arrangements that might have been entered into, to design a scheme which has the support of industry is a major achievement. We should not underplay that in the course of this debate. I congratulate the Minister for Ageing and I congratulate the Department of Health and Ageing for having steered such a major reform through the process of consultation with industry so as to achieve this very significant outcome.

As has been summarised already, these bills put in place an arrangement where, in the event that there is a default by a particular provider in the repayment of accommodation bonds to residents, there is the capacity to levy other providers in the industry—either as a whole or on a selective basis—to recover the costs that the Commonwealth incurs in taking on the responsibility of repaying those bonds to individuals or to their estates. That is a very important piece of security which we confer on residents of aged care facilities in this country. Very often, the product of residents’ life work is in those bonds which are placed in the care of those homes. At the present time there is no protection at all for those bonds. If a home becomes insolvent, for example, there is nothing to prevent those bonds being lost. This package represents a very significant step towards ensuring that those sorts of dangers are averted in the future.

In order to avoid, at all costs, a situation where a provider cannot repay bonds, the industry will need to exercise great vigilance over the standards of accountability and transparency that they use in administering not only the bonds but also the other government funding which those establishments receive. With other developments in the industry in recent years, such as the conditional adjustment payments, which the government has been making in exchange for greater transparency and accountability, these are steps towards ensuring that the likelihood of a default is reduced.

I want to make it clear that the attack that Senator McLucas has made on the government’s general administration of aged care in this country is deeply unwarranted. There is, quite frankly, a distortion of the facts being executed here in order to prove some other broader political point. This does not do anything to enhance the sense of security of people in aged care facilities in this country, and they ought to have a sense of security because Australia does have a high-quality aged care sector. The vast majority of providers do a good job, and the standard of care that they provide is of a high order. People who live in residential aged care facilities in this country can attest to that fact, and most of them do—notwithstanding the fact that there are some conspicuous cases where those standards have not been met.

The suggestion by Senator McLucas that the government is somehow dudding the elderly of Australia by reducing the proportion of aged care beds which are operational is simply without foundation. The fact is that this government has more than doubled expenditure on aged care in the last 10 years, at a time when, clearly, the population of Australia aged over 70 has not doubled. It has doubled that expenditure in real terms because it wants to provide greater opportunity and choice for people in their retirement years.

The government has succeeded in increasing choice by greatly increasing support for home based accommodation packages. That is, people today who wish to remain in their own homes have the option of doing so much more often than was the case under the former Labor government. Those options have been vastly increased, and of course we all know that nine out of 10 Australians—probably 99 out of 100 Australians—would prefer to continue to live in their own homes and to have support in those homes for as long as possible than to move into a residential facility, no matter how attractive those options might ultimately become.

That is what the government has been focusing on and why the number of aged care beds is a less significant factor than the range of choice available to people who are ageing and need assistance to continue to live in their own homes. That is the choice the government has provided with its package and that is what Senator McLucas so comprehensively failed to address.

If you were looking at the situation of aged care provision in this country, the range of choice available to you, the range of support available to you in residential facilities, the quality of those facilities and the support provided by the community to those facilities, you would not exchange for quids the situation that existed 10 or 12 years ago with the situation today. You would be absolutely better off under today’s regime and that is a tribute to this minister and to his predecessors.

I commend the government again on having engineered a quite significant reform in aged care provision in this country with its package. It amounts to a very important set of changes. I do not recall an occasion when as a member of the Community Affairs Legislation Committee I have had the opportunity to be part of a report which has had unanimous support among members. I think that every other bill referred to the legislation committee in this area in the past has had dissenting reports or at least additional comments. This is the first report I can recall which has not had those sorts of comments and it reflects the fact that the government has got it right with its package. I commend the minister on having taken the trouble to ensure that that is the case.