ANDREW CLENNELL, HOST: After that massive reform story of last week, let's bring in aged Care minister Anika Wells, live from Brisbane. Anika Wells, thank you for your time. I guess I'd better ask with the biggest question. A better start, should I say with the biggest question for a lot of self-funded retirees today, what do you say to those who now have to pay up to $13,000 extra a year for their aged care?
ANIKA WELLS, MINISTER FOR AGED CARE AND SPORT: I'd say I have been losing sleep about the state of the aged care system that you may or probably will need to use in your older years, and what I worry about is that there won't be a bed for you at the end of the day if we don't take drastic action, big, bold reform like we have, you would have seen Andrew, the peak provider, ACCPA, has been saying we need to build an extra 10,000 beds per year every year for the next two decades. We need to find more funding into a system that is screaming out for more funding. And that's why it was so important and so good that we received bipartisan support to introduce the new aged Care Act on Thursday.
CLENNELL: And pensioners who may have to pay an extra $300 a year into the part, pensioners who have to pay $700 or more extra. Why are they included in these extra charges?
WELLS: Well, what I'd say is that there remain very strong safety nets for people. There are currently protections and safety nets in the aged care system, and those will remain. So this isn't a question of access. There will always be safety nets to look after people. And the other thing I would say to this point is that the taxpayer will always pick up the cost of your clinical care. The government will remain the majority funder in aged care, so you never have to worry about whether or not you can afford to get a nurse in, or to get your wound dressed, or to make decisions about your clinical care, because the taxpayer will always look after that for you.
CLENNELL: When you first sold these reforms, you said they were about wealthier Australians paying more for their aged care. Yet we have pensioners and part pensioners caught up as well. Has there been a change of mind on your part, or was this always the plan?
WELLS: I'm not sure those are my words, Andrew, though I appreciate that's been the characterisation in the press. What we have said is we need people to make a more reasonable contribution towards the cost of their care, because this is a sector that is screaming out for more funding and the numbers don't lie. If you look at the Intergenerational Report and the numbers of people that will need care, and after the Royal Commission seeking a higher quality standard of care than what we saw and those horror stories that came out in the Royal Commission we needed to do something fairly drastic. And that's what we've done. But I would say to people watching on to your viewers. We have spent two years and tens of billions of dollars trying to lift the standard of care. We put nurses back into nursing homes. There's now an additional 3.9 million minutes of care going into residents every single day, and we tried to lift that standard first before asking people to make a more reasonable contribution. And the other thing, Andrew, that I think is probably important to your viewers is that we've sequenced this very carefully. We thought very carefully about this. First, we poured billions of dollars into this system to try and lift the standard of care, and then we made it more transparent and accountable. So anyone worrying about where this money is going to go today, you can log on to the website ad you can look at Dollars into Care and that shows you for any nursing home across the country, how much money they are putting towards food or staffing costs or admin or profits. So you know where that money is going and all of that.
CLENNELL: The fact that capital can now be taken out of that 2% a year is that seeking to bridge the gap between, I guess, the advantage people with that deposit have over people who just pay fees, because there does seem to be a bit of a gap at the moment.
WELLS: Refundable accommodation deposits exist now in the system. People can make a choice when the time comes to enter residential aged care, whether they want to pay a refundable accommodation deposit, a RAD or a DAP, a daily payment or a mix of both, and there are permitted uses. There are strict permitted uses for how providers use those RADS now, and one of those existing uses is capital, like you're talking about. I guess the problem is, like I've already mentioned, we need to build 10,000 beds every single year for the next 20 years. And since Covid, basically no one has been building beds in aged care. Um, there just hasn't been the money. The system isn't viable. We have to make this system viable because people need a higher quality standard of care than what the Royal Commission showed us. And people need to know that there will be a bed for them or services for them in their home when the time comes for them to need it.
CLENNELL: Do these reforms guarantee that people in aged care will now have a better quality of time there?
WELLS: Well, I would say we already have done some significant things in the past couple of years to lift the standard of care nurses back into nursing homes 99% of the time across the country, or 23.5 hours out of 24 every single day. An additional 3.9 million minutes of care going to people in aged care every single day as a result of the Albanese government reforms. What we want to do, though, like you say, is lift the standard further. People don't want to share a room when they get to residential aged care, and that's fair enough. We need to make sure that these new accommodations are fit for purpose. People have an ensuite or a balcony. They have a nice standard of living. It's not something that they fear to come to.
CLENNELL: There's money in the package for home care, and for technology and the like to allow people to stay at home longer. What sort of technology are we talking about? How would it work
WELLS: Well, there's lots of things in the package that will make it easier for you to stay at home that people really struggle with at the moment. A big one that I get a lot when I do mobile offices is people needing to put a ramp in because they're now wheelchair bound, people needing to fix up the bathroom with rails, etc. So one of the new things in Support at Home is there'll be up to $15,000 for you to modify your home to support you staying there for longer. And the other thing is there's wheelchairs, walkers, a new loan scheme for that. So again, people aren't having to come up with that money up front. And we're making it easy for you to access those kinds of things.
CLENNELL: There's been talk that you wanted to lift the lifetime cap above the 130,000, in terms of what people pay for their aged care that you've ended up with and that you didn't want to grandfather the arrangements which you've agreed with the opposition to do. How much extra would that have saved the budget if you'd gone for your original plan?
WELLS: What I'd say is that I convened the Aged Care Task Force. I chaired the Aged Care Task force that brought together 14 people from all corners of the sector. There were providers in there, there were consumers and consumer advocates in there and representatives from workforce. There were industry and policy experts. And over six months there were some very careful deliberations and there were huge compromises in that room. You know, this is a grand bargain. Everybody has skin in the game here, and everybody had to give up something that was important to them in order for us to all find something that we could live with. Because this was so important, it really took something very bold and ambitious to happen. So I then took the considered recommendations of that task force after six months through the government process, and then we took those to opposition. This is so important. We need bipartisan support and I'm very grateful. The opposition also saw this as something above politics and worthwhile investing in. We had further negotiations with the opposition, and now we have the outcome, which has been introduced into the Parliament and is off to Senate inquiry. For everybody who has views on this, to be able to contribute further.
CLENNELL: It used to be that people would stay in aged care for five years or so. Now the average stay is 18 months to two years. Are you hopeful that by pushing home care even further, you can reduce that time in residential aged care even further? And how many more people do you want to see in home care?
WELLS: What people tell me is they want to be at home. They want Support at Home, and people want to stay at home as long as possible. And people, it must be said, want to die in their own home. Something that hasn't been available in home care to date is palliative care, and that's one of the new features of Support at Home. Up to $25,000 available for people to spend the last 12 weeks of their life coming out of hospital and back into the homes and communities that they love. This is what people want. People have asked us to help them stay at home for longer, so we are re-gearing the entire aged care system to try and give Australians what they want.
CLENNELL: So what happened on the plane on Wednesday when you and Anthony Albanese and Peter Dutton and Anne Ruston were there and the deal was reportedly organised
WELLS: Well, I'm not in the business of repeating private conversations, but like you said, we were all at the Welcome Home Paralympians event, which was a beautiful thing. I think it was the first time that had happened. So lovely to see their faces when they came around the hangar and saw hundreds of people cheering for them, and then we flew home and we were able to strike the most ambitious and transformative reform in aged care in 30 years.
CLENNELL: One other thing that you've had to drop to get this deal through is a workers voice proposal. A representative in each home, which the opposition believed was about the influence of unions. Why did you try to get that proposal up, and are you disappointed to see it go?
WELLS: That was in response to people wanting to make sure that the care minutes, the minutes of care that taxpayers pay are being used well by providers and on care itself. So we're always interested in ways to make sure that taxpayer money is accountable, and that workers are empowered to make their workplaces as best as they can be. And that's what that was about. We'll continue to, I think, work towards a strong role for workers in their workplaces because, you know, they're the people that know best. They're the people that care most about their residents and about making sure that they are providing a high quality service.
CLENNELL: I've been told you haven't even spoken to Anne Ruston The Shadow on this for four months, and that Mark Butler negotiated it through. What was that about? And is that a fair characterisation? I guess, apart from on the plane the other day?
WELLS: I don't think so. It's taken a village like you said. Everyone from the PM and the opposition leader down has contributed to this. And I'm very grateful that everyone's bought in to something that's so important. And aged care often doesn't get the coverage and the spotlight and the policy focus that it deserves. I've been really grateful that people have really bought into this reform. I did the very first negotiation with the Senator, the shadow health minister and the shadow treasurer. There was a mix of different combinations all along the six months. I'm happy it's landed where it has. And it just it really did take buy in from everybody wanting to put this above politics.
CLENNELL: And as I reported at the top of the show, the opposition would like change to the interest rate on the fees at the moment, sitting at a whopping 8% and want that capped. Is that something the government will consider?
WELLS: If they've written to us about that, we would have to consider it. But like I said, the next step in this process is it is going to a Senate inquiry. And for everybody who's got a stake in this, being able to contribute through that. But by far and away the most important thing about this is we've been able to strike a bipartisan reform on a really important policy area that's all about the sustainability of our older Australians and of our budget. And it's been really heartening to be part of that process.
CLENNELL: So that Cap is something that you'd look at in that inquiry process. You'd be happy to look at?
WELLS: Look, I actually haven't read the letter back, so I really can't comment on this any further so far as to say that we've introduced it through the house. It's off to a Senate inquiry. There will be an ability for people to participate through the Senate inquiry before any amendments are moved. And hopefully we can get this through the Parliament by the end of the year.
CLENNELL: Just finally, you reflected on Thursday when this announcement was made about your own time as an aged care worker. How has that shaped how you put this package together.
WELLS: Thanks for asking. It's had a huge impact because like I said, when I walked back into nursing homes as the aged care minister of 20 years after having worked there myself, it really struck me how little had changed. And that speaks to some of the lack of capital investment like we've talked about already in this interview, but also how people who care for residents in residential aged care so much and are doing a good job and don't necessarily have the resources to do that. So my mum and some of her friends who worked in nursing homes alongside my mum, who worked in aged care for 15 years before she retired, I call them my kitchen cabinet. They still provide me a lot of free and generous advice about how we could fix the system, and it's been really, like I said, one of the most significant things I'll ever do in my professional career to contribute to something as important as this.
CLENNELL: Aged Care Minister Anika Wells, thanks for your time