Gary Humphries (ACT, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I want to briefly contribute to this debate, particularly in a role that I have now taken on as co-chair of the Parliamentary Friends of Carers. I took part in the inquiry into this legislation and was very pleased to see that in the Social Security Legislation Amendment (Improved Support for Carers) Bill 2009 and related legislation there is quite a significant step taken to deal with a number of anomalies and hurdles which previously faced those caring for children with a disability. It needs to be stated at the outset that anyone who undertakes such care does so in circumstances where the challenges facing them will be very significant, much more significant than in caring for a child without a disability, and such people deserve as much support as the community can throw in their direction. I hope that these bills represent a small, incremental step towards a higher level of support over time as the Australian community is able to afford to do that, because that care, in a purely economic sense, represents a burden lifted from the shoulders of other Australians as taxpayers and taken on by those individuals who provide that care, particularly to loved ones.

The opposition, as has been said already, does not object to these bills. It believes that they are an important step towards improving the framework for the provision of support to carers. It is also worth making the point that this legislation does not complete the architecture of support for carers in this country. That will indeed be a work in progress for many years to come. I also note that these reforms do build on the many changes made by the Howard government to support for carers, which were described, I think very well, by Senator Fifield in his remarks. There was some suggestion that perhaps the level of re-engineering of support for carers was exaggerated, but I have to say that I think Senator Fifield quite accurately described the many improvements that were made to this level of support and I think his comments were spot-on.

Essentially, the bills expand on the availability of support for carers in the community in a variety of ways, particularly by removing a number of barriers which existed because of difficulties and hurdles faced in accessing payments on the basis of the need that could be demonstrated by the person making an application. For example, the bills improve the qualification provisions allowing for carers to qualify on the basis of short-term and episodic care; remove limitations on the support available for children undertaking hospital stays; deal with issues of automatic qualification for carer allowance with the carer payment (child); contain some new provisions with regard to combined care for adults and children and also contain new provisions for qualification in the case of terminal illness. This has been well described by other speakers in this debate and I will not traverse those points again.

I will comment, however, about that need to look forward to further changes that can be made. It remains a challenge to develop a way of ensuring that people who need to obtain support, or to change the nature of the support that they receive, face the minimum amount of bureaucratic process in order to be able to move to the appropriate level of support. The taskforce, which was chaired very ably by Mr Tony Blunn, reported in 2007 and recommended a simplification of this process. That has led to the instrument which this legislation facilitates: the Disability Care Load Assessment Tool. At the time of the committee inquiry the tool was not available so we did not have a chance to look at it in detail. I have not yet had the opportunity to examine the tool, which has now been made available, and I have not seen the comments of stakeholder groups such as Carers Australia, so I am not sure what their opinion of this mechanism is. But it is very important to acknowledge that this needs to be a simple and effective means of being able to make an assessment of a person’s need and then have appropriate care or support provided.

Carers are, of course, time poor and very often information poor and so the simpler the access process, the better off they will be. It would be distressing to imagine—but it is almost certainly true—that there are many, many carers in Australia who do not access their entitlement because of a lack of knowledge about what they are entitled to or because of a sense of frustration or anxiety about how they actually access those arrangements for support. Sensible procedures need to be adopted to update the validation process here. Senator Boyce made the point that all too often our system still treats disability as a kind of illness, with the implication that at some point the person concerned might grow out of it or get better. That, of course, is a quite erroneous assumption. It is very likely that a person with disability will only have greater needs in the future rather than lesser needs. We should build the system around application for support appropriately.

The other point I want to touch on is the question of exchange care. It is true that there are large numbers of families where mother and father, or two sets of carers, are no longer living with each other. We need to have a sensitive set of arrangements to deal with the question of how to appropriately support parents or carers when they live apart but share the care of their disabled child. It is very difficult to say whether we have quite got that formula right in these arrangements. They are an improvement, but Senator Siewert’s amendments here deserve some further consideration in the future. At this point I am not sure that the coalition will support these amendments but it is an issue to which I believe the parliament needs to return, to make sure that people do not miss out on support which is appropriate when parents are living apart—particularly when there is a single child who is in need of that care and both parents choose, notwithstanding their separation, to provide that care.

In summary, it is impossible not to view the situation of carers in this country, particularly carers of children with disabilities, and not feel a great sense of admiration for the commitment that they make to our social fabric as this is placed in their laps. Payments to these people will only ever constitute a tiny amount of the actual economic value of the care that they supply. We should be mindful of that and generous and forthright in our preparedness to assist them. I am very confident, therefore, that this legislation we consider tonight is on an upwards trajectory of support that will improve, be refined and get more generous as time goes by, subject to the capacity of the Australian community to help share the load that so many people with disabled people in their care shoulder on behalf of the whole Australian community.