Sue Boyce (Queensland, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

The Living Longer Living Better package of five bills is yet another indication of how this government cannot use process to fight its way out of a paper bag. Most of this legislation will not come into force until July 2014, so why the great rush to put it through now? It is all very well for there to be conversations suggesting that debate, research and inquiry into this area have gone on forever, but almost none of the recommendations in the Productivity Commission's report have been picked up by the government and other things have been added in a completely cherry-picking way.

The government is undertaking this extraordinary workforce supplement effort. As far as I can see, it is simply about unionising anyone in the aged-care workforce who currently is not a member of the union. Aged-care providers would have to have EBAs and negotiate with a union. This would mean that the one-third of the aged-care sector that is currently not unionised would become unionised. It looks like a backdoor way of unionising the entire workforce in aged care. We also have this sleight of hand going on with the pay involved in this supplement. There is $1.2 billion over four years for the workforce compact, but no-one has mentioned that this has come out of a $1.6 billion cut in funding to the sector. The $1.6 billion has been moved out of funding and the $1.2 billion has been put into a workforce compact, and the government pretends it has somehow improved the industry.

The coalition very much shares the views of everyone in the aged-care sector that people working in the sector are not sufficiently well paid, nor is their training sufficiently concentrated on, but this is not the way to go about fixing those problems. The other bizarre part of this arrangement is that the government expects that aged-care providers will meet the on-costs associated with the increases in staff pay. This means that they will pay for the increases in holiday costs, superannuation and so on. We have evidence suggesting that in many industries it is almost a dollar-for-dollar cost, so that if pays go up by $50 a week then the total costs to an employer will go up by $100 a week.

Much as we support the need for pay increases within the aged-care sector, this is absolutely not the way to go about providing them. The coalition certainly wants to see reform in the aged-care sector but we do not think it should simply be reform that comes down from on high, as this does. It has been suggested that, when the workforce compact was announced in March this year by Minister Butler, some of the peak industry bodies and leading providers were not invited, and some even boycotted the event because they were so concerned that they were going to end up with more red tape, less funding going directly to assisting patients, and unions interfering in the way that every aged-care facility in Australia functions. When we look at the groups involved in the aged-care industry, we have three unions: the Australian Nursing Federation, United Voice—which of course was Minister Mark Butler's former union base—and the HSU, of which, I think, this place is tired of hearing—

Senator Fierravanti-Wells interjecting—

Senator Fierravanti-Wells suggests that perhaps we should mention some of the corruption which went on, particularly in the New South Wales branch of the HSU through Mr Craig Thomson and which appeared to spill into Victoria. These are not unions that we need in this sector. The sector has functioned well. As we all know, the award is low, but unionising the remaining workforce will make no difference in that area. All it will do is increase the costs in the area and that will mean there is less funding to assist people who live in aged-care facilities and people who receive services.

There are a couple of improvements in this bill in terms of the additional home care packages. But there is no need for this legislation to be rushed through at the rate it currently is. The bill will provide funding of $880 million over five years, but it does not start for some time. So there is no need for the rush that is going on with respect to this legislation.

The coalition want to reform the sector, as I said earlier, but we want to actually talk with the sector about how that reform happens, not have a situation where the sector is just simply told from on high what will happen, how it will happen and without any sort of real consultation about the outcomes. It was quite obvious during the inquiry we had that a number of service providers simply had no idea what the effect of some of this legislation would be on the way that their businesses and their services would work.

We can have a Labor government saying that it is iniquitous that an aged-care service provider might make a profit or have a surplus but, unfortunately, without that they will not improve their services or improve the conditions in which people live. So we have to work this out with others. The coalition is intending to have an aged-care providers agreement framework. That will be the first time ever that aged-care providers have actually been asked about how this industry should be structured. There are many things in this industry that you would do differently if you were starting tomorrow. But a workforce compact that takes some money out of funding and puts it into a bucket to assist unions to develop enterprise bargaining agreements with aged-care homes is not the way to go about it.

None of the outstanding viability issues that affect aged-care providers are addressed in this legislation. I am sure a number of people here will remember the Grant Thornton report into the funding of homes, which led to the alleged improvement with the Aged Care Funding Instrument, ACFI, but which did not achieve what it was supposed to achieve. Most aged-care homes are probably making a surplus or a profit for the year of three per cent. No business in Australia will prosper and stay in business if they are making a three per cent return on money. When that happened, the bank rates were probably about eight or nine per cent. But, even now, with a three per cent return on your money for the investments that you must make, to have resources in this heavily regulated area and to have the sorts of resources that meet the requirements, you need a far better return than three per cent to achieve that.

As I said earlier, one of our great concerns is that these bills only cherry pick some of the Productivity Commission's recommendations. They add even more regulation to what is a highly regulated sector and, whilst they contribute very slightly to reform, the procedures are over the top, heavy-handed and inept. With this government's package, things in the aged-care sector will only get worse.