CATHERINE KING, MEMBER FOR BALLARAT, MINISTER FOR INFRASTRUCTURE, TRANSPORT, REGIONAL DEVELOPMENT & LOCAL GOVERNMENT: Welcome to Creswick, everybody. It's terrific to be joined here by the Acting Prime Minister, Richard Marles, the Minister for Aged Care, Sam Rae, and my state parliamentary colleague, Martha Haylett, the Member for Ripon. I'm Catherine King. I'm really here in my capacity as the federal Member for Ballarat, and welcome to the fabulous Creswick. It is such a beautiful town, very much part of my electorate, and we're here at the Creswick District Nursing Home, which has been providing services for this community for almost, I think, over 100 years now. It is a very important part of our community here as an aged care facility, and we're here today really to thank the workforce, who do an unbelievably magnificent job. Our aged care workers deserve to be paid well. They do one of the most important jobs in our community, caring for our aged care residents as they age in place. The beautiful thing about Creswick is that many of the residents here that you will have just seen have lived here almost their whole lives and are being nursed and cared for by people that they've grown up with. That's the beauty of rural aged care. Really delighted to have Richard and Sam here in Martha's part of the world as well. This is Martha's hometown. Being able to actually acknowledge the incredible work that they do in rural communities, in particular, about being able to age in place, keep those connections, keeps our older people well and truly connected with their community. And I'm delighted to hand over to Richard to say a bit more about what we're announcing today.
RICHARD MARLES, ACTING PRIME MINISTER: Well, thank you, Catherine. It's fantastic to be here in Creswick this morning on this gorgeous day, but on what is a very important day, and it's great to be here with Catherine, Sam, and Martha. People who work in aged care, carers, nurses, do an incredibly important job. For residents in aged care, they deserve the very best of care and the highest quality of care, and of course, for their families, ensuring that care is there is such an important comfort for them. Since we've come to government, we wanted to do everything we can to encourage people who are working in aged care to stay in aged care, and the challenge has always been around pay, and that's why the Albanese Government has been very proud to support the aged care work value case in the Fair Work Commission, and it importantly awarded a significant pay increase to registered nurses and enrolled nurses, to be paid in five separate increases, and the last of those increases is being paid today, the first of August. And what that now means is that for a registered nurse, they're paid $36,000 more every year as a result of this case and as a result of these increases. For an enrolled nurse, that's $32,000 a year more, and that is very deserving. It pays people what they should be paid, given the incredibly important work that they do. But as importantly, what it's doing is helping to retain registered nurses and enrolled nurses within our aged care system. Indeed, turnover has gone down by 30% as a result of these increases. The Albanese Government is incredibly proud to have supported these increases. We really wish all the registered nurses and enrolled nurses today to enjoy the additional increase in their pay packets, but in the same breath, what we really want to say is thank you, thank you for the incredible work that you do for a very special group of Australians. This work value case is about saying we value the work that you do as a country, as a society, and from the Albanese Government's point of view, we most definitely do. And with that, I can hand over to the Aged Care Minister, Sam Rae.
SAM RAE, MINISTER FOR AGED CARE AND SENIORS: Thank you, Richard, and good morning, everybody. We say all the time we want every older Australian to be able to access safe, dignified, and high-quality aged care services. Now, if we want to sustain a world-class aged care system, we've got to pay our world-class aged care workers a fair day's pay. As Richard said, this is the fifth instalment of pay rises for aged care nurses since the Albanese Government was elected in 2022. For a registered nurse on the most common classification, that's $36,000 a year, or 700 bucks a week extra in their pocket. And for an enrolled nurse on the most common classification, it's $32,000 a year, or 600 bucks a week extra in their pocket. These are people who come to work every single day, they work with compassion, they provide dignity, and they look after the people that we all love so very much. These pay rises are about recognising the value of that work, as well as helping out these workers with the cost-of-living challenge. And so, along with my colleagues here today, what I want to say to every aged care worker, and particularly on this day to our amazing aged care nurses, thank you so much for the work that you do to provide dignity, provide care for these beautiful people in our aged care services. On that note, I'm going to hand over to the most brilliant Martha Haylett.
MARTHA HAYLETT, STATE MEMBER FOR RIPON: Thank you, Minister, and thank you so much. It is such a privilege to be here today with the Acting Prime Minister, with Minister King and Minister Rae, to celebrate this pay increase for aged care workers and nurses. This is exactly what our aged care sector deserves, and I'm so proud to see an Albanese Government delivering this. This is the power of state and federal Labor governments working together. We have funded a huge upgrade of this beautiful facility here. Over $12 million has gone into this facility from the state government, and it is fantastic to now see that those aged care workers will get that pay rise that they deserve. This is really what is also at risk this November. So, the Liberal One Nation government have said that they want to make $40 billion of cuts, and that cannot happen without cuts to our healthcare system. So facilities like this need that more support. They do not deserve cuts to our healthcare system, and that is really what is at risk this November.
MARLES: Questions?
JOURNALIST: We've got an issue here in Australia where we're seeing hospitals with a lot of elderly people who could better be accommodated in the aged care system. How can we go about addressing that into the future? That's a real issue.
RAE: Thank you. The issue that you raise is a really important one. It's about delayed discharge within our hospital systems. It's a long-standing issue. It's a very complex one. We've been working really closely with the state governments around the country to deal with this issue. I want to say a couple of things about this. Firstly, there are some instances in which the best care is delivered for older people in a hospital, and we all need to be aware of that. Older people have a right to access hospital services as much as anyone else, and we want to make sure that when old people need hospital care, that they do get it. But we also recognise that our aged care system is under immense pressure, both in terms of the home care system as well as wonderful residential aged care facilities such as this. That's why we've invested a billion dollars through our Aged Care Capital Assistance Program since we were elected in 2022. This coming year, the federal government will spend $47 billion on aged care services across our country, and that will rise well above $50 billion over the coming years. We're undergoing a once-in-a-generation reform program of our aged care system. We all know why that needs to happen. I don't want to dwell on it, but under the last government, we went through a royal commission that issued a report that was titled Neglect. So this reform program is so very important to make sure that every older person, as I said earlier, can receive safe, dignified, and high-quality aged care. We'll continue to make capital investments. We'll continue to invest in the workforce to deliver on that promise.
JOURNALIST: Do we know how many enrolled nurses and registered nurses are in the sector at the moment?
RAE: Well, workforce challenges are a big part of this. It's not just about government funding, and indeed, when we've got demand in the aged care system rising so rapidly, there is an absolute need to invest both in terms of nurses as well as personal care workers. One of the things that we're working on at the moment is understanding what that workforce challenge looks like in the longer term. We've made significant investments to try and support nurses, particularly to come through our scholarship programs, either to enter the aged care workforce, or for the amazing nurses that we've already got working within the aged care sector, to build upon their skills, to specialise, to alongside with these pay rises, build the professionalism of the career, and invest in them to stay here and continue to provide that care.
JOURNALIST: Okay, so how many RNs and ENs are currently in the sector, and how many more do we need?
RAE: Well, we need a lot more, is the short answer. Both enrolled nurses and registered nurses play a critical care role. When we were elected in 2022, I think one of the things that people didn't realise was that nurses weren't in nursing homes anymore. Now, not in every case, and certainly in the case of this facility, it has always been staffed by these amazing registered and enrolled nurses. But in some cases, we didn't have nurses in the aged care space, and so we implemented a 24/7 nursing rule, which essentially meant that every registered aged care facility in Australia would be required to have a registered nurse on staff, 24 hours, seven days a week, and we now have that 99% of the time around the country.
JOURNALIST: You mentioned that demand for aged care is rising. Can you quantify that?
RAE: Yeah. Well, one of the statistics, one of the ways that policymakers measure demand for aged care services, is a statistic which is about people turning 80, having an 80th birthday. This year, 90,000 Australians will have an 80th birthday. That has grown 600% in the last 15 years. We've got the older baby boomers now looking to enter residential aged care, and we've got the youngest part of the baby boomer generation looking to access aged care services in their homes and in their communities. So we've got to continue to invest across the entire spectrum of care within the aged care space to meet what is one of the great public policy challenges of our time: the demographic shift as our population ages.
JOURNALIST: This sounds like quite a decent pay rise for our enrolled nurses and registered nurses in this sector. How are we paying for that rise?
RAE: Well, it is a very decent pay rise. We've invested $18 billion. The federal government has invested $18 billion since we were elected in 2022 to make sure that these people who deserve to be paid fairly are paid fairly. These are award pay increases, so they are fixed within our award system. They ensure people that come to work every single day and provide that care get paid fairly. As I said, this is for a registered nurse on the most common aged care classification. This is 700 bucks a week in their pocket. For the enrolled nurse, 600 bucks a week. This is about bringing these people's pay up to where it should always have been in the first place.
JOURNALIST: So, how much is that costing the federal government annually?
RAE: We've made an $18 billion investment over the last four years in order to meet this challenge. This has been, as I said, about bringing up the wages to where they should have been in the first place. These people have been working their guts out every single day, caring for the people that we love, our parents and our grandparents. But they weren't treated appropriately by the previous government, and they weren't remunerated fairly. So that's why this investment of $18 billion to bring this pay into parity has been so critically important.
JOURNALIST: How are we paying for that? Where's that coming from? Where's that additional money coming from?
RAE: The $18 billion, the federal government has made that investment over the last four years, and so this fifth pay rise represents the final instalment of the five pay rises that the Fair Work Commission laid out in the Work Value Case.
JOURNALIST: Where is the federal government sourcing that additional funding from?
MARLES: So look, it's a matter of priorities. I mean, we fundamentally prioritised this. So we continue to manage the budget in a prudent way. You know, over the course of our government, we've delivered two surpluses. We're managing the budget in a way which is bringing down Liberal Party debt, and so that's what we have been doing in terms of the overall management of the budget. But in the context of that, we prioritised this because this is really important. And as Sam said, investing that kind of money in aged care workers and, in this instance, aged care nurses is a statement by this government about the priority that we see in relation to the work that they do, but also these facilities and the care that is provided to older Australians. So, I mean, the fundamental answer to your question is: this is being delivered by prioritising this area in the context of proven budget management. Got some questions from Canberra?
JOURNALIST: Yeah, thank you, Deputy Prime Minister. On a separate topic, the fuel and fertiliser on the front page of The Australian this morning. Will the government allow an inquiry into the $7.5 billion fuel-fertiliser scheme, given these allegations that it's distorting the market?
MARLES: Oh well, let's be really clear. Today, there is more fuel in Australia than there was the day before the bombing of Iran started. Now, that's an extraordinary achievement, and that's happened because the government has acted quickly and managed this in the national interest. Now, this scheme was critically important in terms of getting the fuel to Australia that we needed. We've applied this scheme in the national interest. That's how the decisions have been made, and the outcome of those decisions is there for all to see. We have more fuel in the country today than we did before the bombing in Iran started, and this is one of the most significant fuel shocks that we've seen in the world ever. And in this moment, Australia has been able to maintain its fuel supply, and the scheme has been fundamental to that.
JOURNALIST: There are some businesses that are facing ruin as a result of the government being able to compete at the same level. Do they deserve compensation?
MARLES: I do not accept what is in that question. What was important here is to ensure fuel supply was maintained. We needed to act quickly, and we needed to act quickly in the national interest, and that's what we've done.
JOURNALIST: On a separate topic on housing, is the federal government putting enough pressure on states and councils to approve new housing developments?
MARLES: Well, we work really closely with the states and through the states with local government to make sure that those approvals are happening. I mean, we've been really clear that one of the critical challenges in terms of dealing with housing supply and ultimately dealing with housing prices is to make sure that more homes are being built, and that's why this Housing Australia Future Fund has been so important in terms of that. But we have been working with state governments through the time that we've been in government to incentivise the approvals being done faster, so that we can get those homes being built, and we will continue to work with the states on that basis.
JOURNALIST: Thank you. The trucking industry is saying that freight costs are going to rise when the carbon subsidies come off tomorrow and over the coming days. What's your message to people at home who are looking at costs increasing as a result of the trucking industry's warnings?
MARLES: Well, I might pass over to Catherine to answer that as the relevant minister. But again, what we are doing is managing all of these circumstances in the context of what we are seeing around the world, and making sure that we are doing so with a focus on price, but also making sure that we're doing so with a focus on fuel supply.
KING: Thanks very much for the question. In essence, what's happened is that the fuel excise and the road user charging temporary relief, while we made sure it could continue to have a strong fuel supply here in Australia. Prices for fuel have fluctuated, and in fact, I think they have managed to stay relatively steady for a period of time. I've spoken at length to the trucking industry. I know they would always have liked the relief to have stayed for as long as possible. But as we've said to them pretty consistently, this was temporary. The reason we did a step-down approach was to allow those businesses to adjust for that to occur. But we are continuing to see good and strong fuel supply, and we are continuing to see good pricing in terms of fuel as well, so that's why we've made the decision to reinstate the road user charge.
JOURNALIST: Apologies, I know you have a very croaky voice.
KING: Sorry about that.
JOURNALIST: Do you expect the price of freight to go up?
KING: Well, what we've had also in place is obviously a contract order to ensure that as prices did go up, that there was the ability, particularly for our freight industry, to be able to actually put those charges into the system. So that ecosystem continues today, and we'll continue to see trucking companies adjust to the circumstances that they're in, but we expect that there won't be huge changes to the way in which the system's working because the price of fuel has remained fairly steady over that period of time.
JOURNALIST: Can I also ask Rae a question? The algorithm-based aged care funding, has there been any movement over this winter recess whether that human override will be reinstated?
RAE: Well, as Minister Butler and I announced, the integrated assessment tool has a range of elements that we continue to work on. We mentioned earlier that we're undergoing a three-month rapid review of the prioritisation mechanism at this stage. We're waiting to see what comes out of that review, and obviously we will implement whichever aspects of that get the very best outcomes for older people. We are also looking at other functionality circumstances in which perhaps the approach to standardisation doesn't necessarily reflect the needs of an individual, and making sure that we've got the functionality within the system to get people the care that they need.
JOURNALIST: Has that been raised with you today via aged care residents at all or over the last few weeks?
RAE: No, we've had some wonderful conversations today, but it hasn't been a feature of those conversations, kind of.