The public and PM support you

Minister for Mental Health and Ageing, Mark Butler, believes that public opinion is very much in favour of aged care reform.

By Stephen Easton

There’s a strong chance that calm waters lie ahead for the ship of aged care reform, as both the Australian public and Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, support the need for sector-wide structural change, the Minister for Mental Health and Ageing, Mark Butler, told delegates at the Aged and Community Services Australia (ACSA) National Conference today.

The minister, who addressed conference attendees this morning via video link, indicated he had become aware over the past 12 months that public opinion was “very much in favour” of government spending on aged care and aged care reform, citing recent polling and survey data.

Mr Butler noted that over the same 12-month period, Prime Minister Julia Gillard had also spoken increasingly about “a much broader agenda around health and ageing”, and that aged care reform was “utterly central” to that agenda.

The fact that Ms Gillard had fronted the media to release the report herself was, he said, a very positive sign demonstrating how seriously she had taken the opportunity to improve the industry.

“The Prime Minister herself has very much stamped her authority on the report,” Mr Butler said. “Obviously she wasn’t in a position, or the government was not in a position, to give a tick to any of the recommendations of the Productivity Commission (PC) right now but importantly, she didn’t rule any of them out.”

While not yet ready to support or reject any of the PC’s 58 recommendations, he moved to reassure the sector that there were “four guiding principles for this task”.

The four principles included: the right of every Australian to access the level of care and support they need; that all Australians deserve control and choice far beyond what is offered in the current system; that funding needs to be fair and equitable; and that quality needs to be maintained and improved.

Minister Butler added that the government was willing to listen to “anything else the sector or the public wants to add” – indicating that although the PC inquiry has been completed, the government was open to further responses to its final report.

The minister then fielded questions from members of the audience,  in the course of which he confirmed that he was “up for the discussion” over whether excessive aged care regulations restrain consumer choice and stifle industry innovation.

“I really think if we are serious about expanding consumer choice and unleashing the innovative spirit of aged care providers, [then] on the table needs to be the question of regulation – not just federal but state as well,” he said.

While keeping his cards close to his chest, Mr Butler also confirmed in his responses that he had asked the Department of Health and Ageing to consider ways of taking action to fix workforce issues as an urgent priority, before acting on other elements of the PC report.

Asked whether there would be “certainty of actual access” to long term debt financing, the minister said he was “alive to that issue” and that more detailed discussions would be required.

“I think it’s a critical element of our discussions and certainly in my mind it will be really important to get really good advice in those discussions from Treasury, and also from the banking sector,” he said. “I think it’s utterly central to ensuring we have a sustainable residential care sector into the future.

“Sustainability and ongoing viability are more challenging if the government decides to open up supply. We then do have to think about those issues in a slightly different way in residential care.”

Tags: acsa, acsa-national-conference, aged-care-reform, department-of-health-and-ageing, julia-gillard, mark-butler, minister-for-mental-health-and-ageing, prime-minister-julia-gillard, productivity-commission,

2 thoughts on “The public and PM support you

  1. Words, words, and more words. What is missing is action. Let’s see some action with aged care reform?

  2. If one of the Guiding principles is that funding must be fair and equitable, how can the minister stand by and allow a miserable 1.7% increase in funding for each of the past 2 years when the cost of staff wages are going up by 3-5% annually. Workforce shortfalls are a direct result of low wages, driven by government policy. The issues here are the Governments making and only they can solve them.

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