There’s some truth there at the end of Senator Smith’s contribution that I’d like to agree with. There is no doubt that the aged-care sector has been under a lot of stress since before the pandemic. There is no doubt that there needs to be more funding for aged care in this country, and, of course, a pandemic, which no-one could have predicted the timing of, was always going to put much stress on that system.
This government, though, has responded to the long years of neglect Senator Smith mentioned. The years of neglect go back through previous governments on both sides of politics, but it was this government that commissioned a royal commission to look at the state of the aged-care sector, warts and all, and it is this government that is responding to that commission with record amounts of additional funding over the years to come. Of course, not every problem or issue can be solved overnight. The problems have emerged over many decades and therefore cannot be solved in a year or two.
That extra funding will have an impact over time, and I’ll come to that later. But before I get to that detail I want to acknowledge the commitment, the hard work and the stress that aged-care workers must have gone through over the past two years. It was already a strained and stressful environment for workers in that sector, but to have the extra obligations of being COVID-safe and the extra staff pressures of isolation rules and COVID cases has of course put those people who are on the front lines under great strain. I pay tribute to the work they have done. I believe that, in tough times, that sector as a whole has done the best it could to handle this once-in-a-century pandemic.
There does need to be more funding to improve aged-care centres in this country. There does need to be more money available to attract staff, potentially increasing wages over time to do that, to keep up with the offers that exist now. The NDIS is another care sector that’s been well-funded by this government and that is competing for these types of staff in aged-care centres. We have to respond by offering attractive employment options to those who love the aged-care sector and want to continue to work in it.
That’s why the government is putting forward $18 billion in funding in response to the royal commission. That is going to make a difference over time. It’s not going to happen overnight. We have, through the pandemic, put an additional $600 million into bonuses for staff in the sector, to provide an immediate top-up. But what we need to do over the longer term is to grow incrementally the funding that exists in the aged-care pool such that providers, both public and private, can offer a reasonable and competitive wage to those who work in the sector.
There have been suggestions from the other side in this debate that somehow the government or Canberra bureaucrats here should impose these wages, that they should just unilaterally increase wages across the sector. That’s not how our industrial relations system works, nor should it be how it works, because almost invariably we’ll get it wrong here in Canberra. We’ll stuff it up. If we try to centrally plan every aged-care sector in the country there’ll be enormous perverse outcomes. We’ll have wage rates inapplicable to some types of work or some centres in regional areas and there’ll be devastation across the land. What we need to do is to respect the industrial relations framework we have through the Fair Work Commission and have viable, well-funded aged-care centres that can respond to that process.
We heard during question time that the Leader of the Opposition, Mr Albanese, knows how the system works. That’s what he said in response to it—that we need to let the Fair Work Commission work. But the opposition didn’t want to hear. They tried to silence their own leader, the Leader of the Opposition, in question time. Every time the minister tried to say, ‘This is what Mr Albanese, the Leader of the Opposition, thinks about how the system thinks, this is what he believes,’ the Labor Party would get up and say: ‘A point of order: they are quoting our leader. He doesn’t know anything. He doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Why are you quoting Mr Albanese?’ They tried to shut it down. I do agree with Mr Albanese’s point that we need to have a flexible approach to this industry that provides good funding but allows individual aged-care centres to work with their workforces, customers and aged members of the Australian community to get the best outcomes they can during this pandemic and beyond.
