Page 1390 - Week 05 - Tuesday, 3 May 2016
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The Business Chamber said that if you are actually going to have such a scheme, the aged-care sector would perhaps like to have its own portable scheme covering residential and home care. Yet this has now become a catch-all. It may have the inadvertent effect of perhaps having people leaving aged care and moving into other forms of community service and back again, and circulating around, whereas what the aged-care sector would prefer—and I think what the people living in the aged-care facilities would prefer—is certainty about who is looking after them. They get very attached to those who work for them and work with them, and it is very important, particularly for those who have some form of dementia, that they have that routine. Whether this will have a detrimental effect is unclear, but there are concerns there.
The Canberra Business Chamber sent a letter to Mr Gentleman on 6 April, and it lists a number of things. I will not go through them here because I get the sense that there will not be any changes from the government. I suspect Mr Rattenbury will just go along for the ride as is the normal case. But I think the issues that are there will come back to haunt us. I think that in time we may well find, as we have done so often with this government and their legislation, that we have to come back to clean it up. And I think that we need to be very careful about changing the way an industry operates, not necessarily for the better. If this has a detrimental impact on the provision of aged-care services, particularly for the residents in the facilities, that would be a very bad thing.
We will watch very closely to see what the effect of this will be. We would certainly ask the government to make sure that they keep a watching brief on whether or not the legislation has some of the detrimental effects that have been outlined in various submissions that they have been given, both in the waste and in the aged-care sectors. We will certainly be keeping an eye on it and keeping in touch with all the people who provide those services and ensuring that in the future we have the best aged-care sector that we can have, that the people of the ACT deserve.
With that, we do not believe this is appropriate at this time. We do not believe that there is any urgency to rush it through. There are questions for some organisations if this is passed today, which it will be. It will probably come into law by Friday; that is less than eight weeks until the commencement date of 1 July. If this was so urgent, perhaps the government should have got it into the Assembly earlier. From industry reps, I am told that there will be some leniency or understanding as people may have to rewrite or purchase new systems to be able to cope with these changes. But a guarantee of leniency or understanding does not necessarily mean that the government will allow that to continue for a period of time. And for some smaller organisations there may be a huge impost in purchasing a new software system that covers the management. If they are lucky, they might be able to buy a new module for the existing program. They may have to have it written in some cases. In some cases they may have to go and purchase new software. Again, there is additional expense for what is a very unclear gain to the industry as a whole. That said, we will be opposing the bill today.
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