Rachel Siewert (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I want to ask some questions specifically around this particular amendment and in response to what the minister has just said. Is the government proposing, as we noted in our contributions and as you yourself earlier noted, that there will be further amendments to this commission process? Is the government thinking that you will be dealing with the skill mix a bit later on? This is a really serious issue and it is going to keep coming up again and again. It is better to have a proper process in place rather than what we have now. For example, we don't even have a guarantee that we will have a nurse on 24/7, which some of us think is the absolute minimum that would be required. Recent studies have shown that the amount of contact and care hours that are required is four hours and 18 minutes, and we are nowhere near that in Australia. Those are the sorts of things the public wants to know, consumers want to know and, importantly, the families of residents in aged care particularly want to know as well.