Tony Sheldon (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I spoke in the chamber on Monday on the need to look at aged care from the standpoint of the workers who are the care. Today I want to issue a call on behalf of all Australians for an historic reassessment of the funding and structures of aged care in this country. Firstly, we need to be clear about who is responsible for fixing aged care, whether the aged-care facility is publicly owned, owned by a for-profit company or owned by a not-for-profit, like Anglicare's Newmarch House.

Scott Morrison likes to pass the buck on a lot of things: on the bushfires, on the robodebt scandal, on sports rorts and now on aged care. But, if the care of our older Australians is to be reformed, the federal government—and only the federal government—is able to lead the process. We've heard a lot of talk about fact-checking, so let's do a bit of fact-checking. Scott Morrison and his hapless minister, Richard Colbeck, can start by listening to and learning from one of their own: Liberal senator and former aged-care minister Senator Fierravanti-Wells.

Senator Fierravanti-Wells was very clear that it was the same Liberal government, under the leadership of Tony Abbott, that utterly failed to act to fix the sector when it had the chance. That's a fact. The senator did an interview recently with The Sydney Morning Herald's David Crowe. It didn't get the attention it deserves, but this is the point. She said, pointedly, that Scott Morrison was one of the social services ministers responsible for aged care and that when this government squandered a chance for reform it failed to do it under his watch. That's a fact. I urge my colleagues from the Liberal and National parties to read the senator's submission to the aged-care royal commission. If they don't care to heed the voices from this side of the chamber then they should care to listen to their own.

Just in the last day, Victorian Liberal MP Russell Broadbent issued a call to Scott Morrison to increase funding for not-for-profit aged care. He said that handing over the care of older Australians to the private sector has been a disaster waiting to happen. Profit became more important than care. We know that since aged care was privatised in the 1990s people have built vast fortunes by taking billions in public money with little or no accountability in return. That is not news to anyone who has been paying attention. A recent story in The Age by investigative journalist Michael Bachelard exposed—not for the first time—the lavish lifestyles that have been built off the backs of vulnerable older Australians and the underpaid workers who take care of them. It is grotesque; aged care has become the worst kind of predatory capitalism. Companies in the sector, like Bupa, Opal, Allity, Japara, TriCare and others have had a range of different corporate structures. But what they often have in common is the payment of extremely low or no tax in Australia. They pay low pay and offer insecure work to their staff, and, most critically, all operate with little or extremely low transparency on where and how the billions they receive from taxpayers are actually spent on care.

I will give one example of privatised, for-profit care. Regis is the largest for-profit aged-care home chain listed on the Australian Stock Exchange. According to a 2018 report by the Tax Justice Network, the company is majority owned by two founders, Ian Roberts and Bryan Dorman. When Regis listed on the Stock Exchange, they instantly gained a $734 million fortune. So not only are these private aged-care operators taking up to 70 per cent of their revenue but, with little requirement to account for that money, they receive additional money from the public purse—from the taxpayer—through calculated franking dividends. But what do these incredibly wealthy owners of this profitable company do when a global pandemic hits? In the case of Regis, the Health Services Union wrote to them asking them to provide paid pandemic leave for staff who need to test and isolate due to illness. Of course, so far, like the vast majority of not-for-profit care agency operators, they've refused to pay anything.