Mr RAMSEY (Grey—Opposition Whip) (18:38): I also recognise what the member for Nicholls just put on the line there to share with Australia, and I thank him for it.
Reforming the aged-care sector is necessary; it’s a fair call, and it is time for reform, with the Aged Care Bill 2024. We have co-operated with the government on the royal commission recommendations, at least part of the response, and we’ve reached broad agreement with the government on the financial arrangements, which will be a penalty on some Australians, and it took some work to achieve some amendments, which we believe are right and proper. The fact the bill is now in this form I suggest means the government agrees with us. That’s a good thing. The member for Nicholls just detailed the fact that we negotiated the grandfathering clause. I think this is basic good governance at any level, whether reforming tax systems or assistance programs. Anyone who has invested in an existing government policy should not be disadvantaged retrospectively by a change of government policy. I think, pretty much with everything governments do, it should be grandfathered and always looking to the future. That is the right and proper thing to do.
Better taper rates that are a little more generous—in fact, I think we halved the taper rate that the government first suggested for obvious reasons. And the fixed timeline—I think the fixed lifetime cap is an assurance for people. I’m working on getting old, Mr Deputy Speaker! I intend to be working on it for some time yet! It is my view that, as people get older, they’re a little more careful with the money they have managed to accumulate through their life. They think, ‘This is mine,’ and, in many cases, they want to pass it onto their children. I’m not sure that they should be of that opinion. I think maybe that’s causing as many problems as it helps. But you can understand that, regarding that fixed lifetime cap.
Of course, one that is extremely important to me and that maybe we haven’t pushed hard enough is the $300 million spend for infrastructure. It is that area that I want to spend the bulk of my speech talking about—that is, the disadvantage of rural and regional electorates in trying to provide aged care, what amount we will sit on and how much tougher it is to manage there than elsewhere. Aged care in the country is extra expensive—higher costs, food supplies, transport—particularly for staff. That seems a little illogical, but the problem is, because we can’t fill our staffing rosters, aged-care facilities frequently have to resort to agency staff, which is around two to three times the cost of regular staff. They just have no choice. They’ve got to keep their doors open.
Legislation was passed in this place I think last year—it may have been earlier this year—by the government to enforce every aged-care facility to have a 24/7 registered nurse on call. For smaller facilities, it’s just a bar that is too high and it’s more expensive staffing. That has led them to using agency staff as well or breaking the regulations and running the risk of being curtailed. In my electorate, I’ve already lost one nursing home, one that my aunty lived in, incidentally, for some years. It was a very nice place down at Stansbury on Yorke Peninsula called Elanora. Four years ago it closed. It was a community run organisation, but they hit hard times, and so it was taken over by Eldercare, who did their best, but, in the end, they too were beaten by the staffing issues.
I could take you there, Mr Deputy Speaker, to Stansbury. It’s like heaven on a stick. It’s a beautiful Yorke Peninsula little seaside coastal town. You’d think, ‘Why wouldn’t people want to go there and work?’ But it’s around about 2½ or three hours from Adelaide, and they don’t want to go there to work. They don’t want to go there and live. People want to come there for holidays. They fill up the shacks all the time—not a problem. But we just can’t get the staff there. I’ve got another one on Yorke Peninsula that is seriously under pressure at the moment, at a time when actually the demand for aged care is increasing. It’s not as if we haven’t had the warning. It was in 2002 that Peter Costello released the first Intergenerational report and identified exactly this issue—that the ageing of Australia was going to present an ongoing and increasing challenge for younger Australians as they were asked to fund the retired people of this nation—and asked how we would deal with that.
So one of the problems we have in this ageing Australia is people like me. I think I’m a baby boomer. I’m never too sure about where those margins fit in, but I’ll settle for that. We all want better. We want better facilities than our parents aged in and our grandparents aged in. We want better rooms. We want independent baths and showering facilities, and for good reason. We’ve just been through a pandemic, and you can justify that on medical and health grounds alone. So we want better. But better costs more. Better means knocking down old facilities that actually can do the job, but nobody wants to use them anymore.
I’m very grateful for this: in Whyalla, we have a community-run organisation that really hit hard times and got to the point of having to close their doors. Helping Hand, which is a Catholic, Uniting Church associated aged-care facility stepped in and took over management, and it was running until the last election. I managed to secure a commitment from the government at the time of a $10 million grant to help them rebuild and refurbish, to get rid of the shared bathrooms and to build some extra facilities. We did not win the election, and the Labor party did not make the same commitment. But I’m very grateful that they did come to the party. Eventually, prices went up, as they have everywhere, but $17.2 million has come from the current federal government to Helping Hand in Whyalla, and I’m very grateful for that investment. I think we can see the pathway forward there now, with management from a bigger organisation having some advantages and providing some economic gains.
But we need investment similar to that and in fact even more in Port Augusta at the moment. We’ve got facilities that are in the 1970s style, and they need to be upgraded. There’s demand there. We have a private operator there. To give you some idea, the private operator came into possession of facilities that were owned by the council and sold to the private operator for $1. That will give you some indication of how much money it was not making—how much money it was losing. We’ve had someone be prepared to stick their hand up and take the risk. I understand that they are breaking even, but there is no way in the world we can find the kind of investment dollar they need to refurbish, rebuild and expand. The $300 million is very important. I make the point that there are 150 electorates around Australia, so $300 million won’t go all that far. That’s the answer.
This is a reform. It will help fund the health system. It will ask people who have more to contribute more. I’m not against that. I think the fact that we’ve come together means it will be accepted a little more than if it were a politically difficult decision. In government, in nine years, things get forgotten quickly, I might say. In government, in nine years, we tripled the number of home-care packages. We went from somewhere around 60,000 to over 200,000. We’re still being criticised—quite rightly, I guess, because there weren’t enough, and there are still not enough. But it’s worth remembering that, in nine years, we tripled the number of home-care packages. We invested a further $18 billion a year into aged care.
It raises serious issues for Australia, with ever-increasing demand on government services everywhere. Our stalled and indeed falling per capita productivity is a huge concern. If we want more and better health care, aged care, child care, education and NDIS and we don’t want to pay more taxes—and clearly a majority of Australians don’t want to—some way or another, we’ve got to increase productivity. We cannot have a backwards slip in productivity. The only way Australia will be able to afford the future it wants is if we are more productive. That means we have to take the bull by the horns here in this place and talk about how we get more for the same, if you like. How do we get the work of the nation to make sure we have a better outcome for our efforts? If you ask any individual worker, ‘Can you work harder,’ they’ll say, ‘No.’ But we are not keeping up with the rest of the world. One way or another, we need to re-examine what we do.
This goes to fundamental issues. We now have a 37.5-hour working week in Australia. I think it’s 37. We’ve got people who only want to work four days a week, not come to work and do everything else that goes with that. I think we all, as Australians, need to put our shoulders a little harder to the wheel. I don’t think I will win a lot of votes advocating for a 40-hour week. But maybe that’s what we need. Maybe Australia needs to go back to having all of us going just a little bit harder. For me, a 40-hour week looks like taking most of it off. There are other people out there running delis and small businesses that are exactly the same as the people that work in this place. That is not a magic answer, but it’s one option. I just think we all need to do a bit more.
The proposals of an ever-expanding holiday, workplace benefits, restrictions on workplace practices, working from home, and leave entitlements forever expanding—we just need to think about what it is we do here in this place. When I hear in South Australia that the government walks in one day and decides it would be a good idea if we had an extra public holiday on Easter Sunday—that’s fine for them, apart from the hospitals. No-one was working for the government on Sunday but everybody out there running a deli on that day, everybody trying to cater for public services now has to pay double time and a half on Sunday when it would have been a regular weekend rate before. Those are the decisions that are made in Parliament House that have effect on the ground and that, in the end, affect things like the way that we deliver aged care. In aged care: higher wages—good, give it a tick. Better quality care? Absolutely, we’re all in favour of that. Better facilities? Absolutely, we’re in favour of it. But they all cost, and so do staffing ratios.
It’s arguable, particularly with smaller facilities, that the staffing ratios should be different, and there should be far greater recognition. There was a little move in the last budget, for far greater recognition given the role of enrolled nurses in aged care. Now, I don’t want to belittle anyone in the industry—a lot of aged care, though, is not rocket science. It’s about having the right attitude—the aptitude, if you like. When people say, ‘Why cant we get more people working in aged care?’, I often say, ‘Aged care, disability care or any other kind of care—it’s not as if we are all adaptable to it or suitable.’ I think you need to have vocation. Some people are just not good with other people. Maybe it’s intentional or maybe it’s genetic. I’m not sure they are the people that I want in aged care; I want people who are, by nature, treated by kindness, care and the capacity to take less than optimal—I don’t mean in the sense of wages; I mean in the sense that they might have different customers but they need to rise above that. I think they do something very special.
One of the downsides of the royal commission that I lament was the focus on some bad facilities and some bad workers that I think, in a way, degraded care workers in the eyes of the public across the board. People were saying, ‘I don’t enjoy the job anymore because they all think that we’re abusing these oldies in here.’ I know from the facilities I walked into, the people I talked to and the people I know who work within them that it is not the case. It is not anything but a very tiny minority, but that minority gained a lot of airplay in that space. It had to be exposed—I’m not saying it doesn’t—but there is collateral damage that sits within the industry. So we need to pay them better. We need to provide better facilities. This bill will help with all those things. But we also need to continue to recognise the contribution that those workers in the industry make, and generally what a wonderful job they do for caring for the people in this nation, for what it is.