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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2003 Week 13 Hansard (25 November) . . Page.. 4606 ..

MR CORNWELL (continuing):

another difficulty, and that is the issue of nursing home staff shortages and the relatively low wages they are being paid. On the front page of the Canberra Times of 12 July there is a headline "Nurses Desert Aged Care". The article states that aged-care nurses earn up to 26 per cent less, or $200 a week less, than their hospital-based colleagues.

What has the Labor government in this territory done to address this problem? I suggest to you nothing. While nursing homes are being lured away-

Mr Corbell: Who employs them, Greg?

MR CORNWELL: Just a moment, you have a responsibility. They are going interstate, I believe, where wages are better. We know the Commonwealth provides the overall funding for nursing home wages, but it doesn't set out the terms and conditions for them. This is done through awards or enterprise bargaining by the states and the territories. I think the ACT government should be looking at some method of improving this. We see only today in the Canberra Times that we are going overseas to try to fill the vacancies. That is a good step in the right direction.

But the fact of the matter is that we are in a parlous situation in relation to the provision of aged care in this territory. All we have had for two years of this Labor government is promises and promises that something was going to happen; we are going to provide more aged-care facilities.

I repeat the Calvary Hospital example. We have been sitting here for two years waiting for that to be sorted out. What about the Lake Ginninderra site that is still being argued over? What about St Andrews Hospital down there at Hughes? What about the three sites that you mentioned, I think in Tuggeranong, for additional aged-care facilities? It is fine to have all these things promised, but we want to see some foundations being dug; we need to see some bricks and mortar being put together; and of course we need to see some people coming in to look after these elderly people.

For two years we have had no evidence whatsoever-zero beds-in terms of facilities being constructed to take the pressure off the hospital acute beds, to take the pressure off carers, to take the pressure off families. And it is not just families here in the ACT; there are people whose parents or elderly relatives are in nursing homes in Sydney, et cetera, and they are obliged to go back and forth seeing them at weekends or, presumably, when they can. This creates a massive problem. And we should really be addressing it.

As I say, Mr Speaker, I do not expect that these problems can be solved overnight. Obviously-and Mr Corbell has been at great pains to tell me this-we can't expect the government to break the law concerning planning matters. I don't expect the government to break the law. I do expect them, however, to expedite the planning process for these aged-care facilities because we do have a crisis, and it is a growing crisis. It is not going to go away; it is going to get worse.

But in two years of this Labor government that is so keen to extol all the wonderful things that it has done in social engineering and such like, we have seen nothing on the ground for our most vulnerable citizens, our aged, and, I would suggest, equally vulnerable citizens, their relatives and their careers. This government, Mr Speaker, should be ashamed of themselves in their treatment of these elderly people.

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