Murray Watt (Queensland, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry) Share this | Hansard source

I'll just try and get some advice on that point. While I'm obtaining that advice, I'll just reiterate this point: it is disappointing to see the opposition continue to do what they did for 10 years—which is failing to deal with the need for 24/7 nurses in Australian aged-care facilities. As I said earlier, when I was talking about this issue in the run-up to the election, I found people were shocked that we don't have 24/7 registered nurses in aged-care facilities. It's very clear that one of the reasons for the range of appalling incidents that we've seen involving care in aged care is not bad staff but a lack of staff. It seems that the opposition continues to want to delay this important measure, which is about providing extra support for residential aged-care workers so that they can provide better care for residents. I've already acknowledged that there are challenges in implementing this in rural and regional environments, and that's why this government is putting more resources into fixing this situation than we ever saw from the former government. As I say, it's disappointing to see these ongoing delay tactics from the opposition when we finally have a government that wants to fix it.

The information that I have been provided with just now is that the government will be providing, overall over four years, $2.5 billion towards 24/7 and increased care minutes. We're introducing a 24/7 registered nurse supplement to support residential aged-cares services to employ extra registered nurses to be on site and on duty 24 hours a day, seven days a week. We'll invest $473.3 million over three years from 1 July 2023 in a new RN supplement that tops up Australian National Aged Care Classification care minutes funding to support smaller services to meet their 24/7 requirement. Initially, the supplement will be available to eligible services providing care to up to 60 residents. Services over this size will not receive the supplement, as their existing care minutes funding will be sufficient for providing 24-hour care, taking into account the previously announced funding increases and the additional $1.9 billion in Australian National Aged Care Classification funding in the budget to increase care minutes to 215 minutes, including 44 RN minutes, from 1 October 2024. This supplement will be available to eligible providers from 1 July 2023.

On exemptions, the government has considered feedback from the sector around current workforce shortages and will allow one-off 12-month exemptions to the 24/7 RN requirement for all services of 30 or fewer beds in modified Monash model 5 to 7 areas. This exemption is provided on the basis that small rural and remote services are likely to face the most significant workforce challenges in recruiting sufficient RNs to meet the requirement. Exempt services will not, of course, receive the RN supplement. We are taking into account the challenges that rural and remote services in particular will have in attracting workforce. Again, if we'd had a government at some point over the last 10 years that had been prepared to invest in workforce and prepared to build the skills of the workforce, then perhaps we wouldn't be having this problem.