Taskforce response long overdue, delegates hear

It’s time the government responded to the recommendations of the Aged Care Taskforce, providers have been told at an industry conference. 

Speaking in Sydney last week at the Aged and Community Care Providers Association’s state conference for New South Wales and the Australian Capital Territory, Grant Corderoy – taskforce member and senior partner at benchmarking firm StewartBrown – said: “We’ve been talking about the delay for quite a while and, in fact, it’s become very pressing.”

The taskforce – established to advise on aged care funding arrangements – handed its final report to government in December. “The final recommendations with a little bit of nuancing were the same”, said Mr Corderoy. So it has been seven months since the taskforce delivered its report – “or more” – delegates were told.

Many in the sector were expecting mention of the recommendations in the May budget. Surprisingly, there was none. “Does that mean that they’re not going to be enacted?” asked Mr Corderoy.

However, Mr Corderoy told delegates he was comfortable that the Treasurer’s budget speech failed to reference the recommendations. If Jim Chalmers had, he said, the press the next day would’ve have run the headline “budget hasn’t met the cost-of-living crisis” next to another saying, “taskforce wants people to pay more for aged care”.

“I don’t think any government of the day wanted to have that conflict and I was happy because we need not to conflate those two arguments.”

But Mr Corderoy did note that Minister for Health and Aged Care Mark Butler said that the Aged Care Act and the taskforce recommendations were “implicit in sustaining sustainability in the aged care sector.”

“That’s on the record,” said Mr Corderoy. “So I don’t think that the government is going to be walking away from it. I think what they’re doing is trying get support.”

Mr Corderoy told delegates that 90 per cent of stakeholders supported the recommendations of the taskforce. “It’s always the noise from the other 10 per cent and the concerns of the 90 per cent who say they want everything today” that gets the most attention, he said.

The taskforce recommendations will be transformative, said Mr Corderoy. “I think the next five years will be the most exciting five years in aged care, but we’ve got to get the funding levels right.”

“From the taskforce point of view, I was going to say there’s light at the end of the tunnel and we’ve reached the finishing line ­– but it’s really the starting line,” he added.

The taskforce, said Mr Corderoy, “was a tacit recognition from the government that we need to get more funding … it was a recognition that – particularly residential aged care but also in community care – we need to get more funding and more certainty. So I saw that as a significant plus.”

The government is brave to take on the taskforce recommendations, said Mr Corderoy. “The government of the day, their first reaction is not to make change because people have issues with change.”

It is now time to “enforce the change”, said Mr Corderoy, “and recognise that some of the taskforce recommendations might not be everything when they come through but they are going to be substantial.”

In an echo of an earlier statement made by ACCPA chief Tom Symondson, Mr Corderoy added: “And we really have to work together.”

We need to prepare ourselves for the future

In all, the taskforce made 23 recommendations to government. Running through some of the core proposals, Mr Corderoy said the first key recommendation was a commitment that the government would continue to be the major funder of aged care. “That sets Australia apart from many countries overseas. And the second thing was to make sure we have a safety net; that the people who haven’t got the financial means are in no way disadvantaged.”

Another key recommendation: to protect thin markets. “They could be regional markets. Or particular markets whether they be Indigenous, whether they be LGBTI, whether they be particular ethnic communities, they are important markets and we want to make sure they are covered and not disadvantaged.”

Turning to the recommendation that those who can afford it contribute to non-care services, Mr Corderoy said: “If they’ve got the means the resident should pay. They should pay the costs that they have paid for all of their lives.”

“We need to prepare ourselves for the future,” said Mr Corderoy. “For the first time in Australia’s history, we’re going to have a new cohort of people entering aged care over the next 10 years … the boomers are coming.”

What do boomers do? he asked “We spend. But we spend when we’re getting the level of service or accommodation that we want.”

So it’s important, Mr Corderoy told delegates, that providers are across service delivery and standards of accommodation. “Because boomers will spend when they’re getting a service delivery that they want and they’ll spend when they’re getting a style of accommodation they want or they’re getting the service in their own home that they want … because the boomers are going to want different levels of service for home care.”

This is going to lead to innovation, said Mr Corderoy. “We’re starting to see it already.” But to innovate, “we have to have a sustainable [residential care] sector,” he added. “And we also have to have a sustainable home care sector … This is the big challenge for aged care – an exciting challenge. But that can only happen if we get the right funding coming forward.”

Returning to a previous remark, Mr Corderoy said: “So, yes, we are actually at the starting line. It’s not the finishing line … Exciting times indeed.

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