Carol Brown (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

To continue: that will involve a test, including a carer questionnaire and a treating health professional questionnaire, which will be used to assess the functional ability behaviour and special care needs of children under 16 and the level of care provided by their carers. The government’s amendments contained in the primary bill have been supported by a number of key stakeholders, including Carers Australia, who told the Senate Standing Committee on Community Affairs inquiry that they saw:

… the introduction of the bill as an important step in addressing many of the unfair and inequitable rules and provisions that currently exist in the carer payment system and the broader income support system.

The National Disability Services representative stated:

I strongly think that the direction of this bill is the right one and in a number of ways it will allow more people to receive carer payment (child), and streamline the receipt of carer allowance for those who are not already receiving carer allowance as well.

It is significant that the amendments have been largely endorsed by key advocacy groups such as Carers Australia and National Disability Services as a step in the right direction when it comes to providing better support to carers of children with disability. Importantly, under these amendments, for the very first time eligibility for the payment will be extended to carers in respect of a child who requires care on a short-term, episodic basis. There will also be more generous arrangements for carers of children who are in hospital so the carers can keep their carer payment and, if payable, their carer allowance while their child is in hospital. This means that the current limit on payment in these circumstances of 63 days in a calendar year will no longer apply and will be replaced by a 12-week review cycle. These amendments will also see the qualification rules relaxed in the tragic situation where a carer is caring for a child with a terminal illness.

Overall, the changes contained in the primary bill build on the government’s firm commitment to better support and assist carers of children with a disability. By introducing these changes the government is extending financial assistance to more carers around the country, something that I am sure everyone in this place would support. The bill has the support of the Senate community affairs committee, which unanimously recommended that the bill be passed. These bills illustrate the government’s genuine commitment to ensuring that adequate financial assistance is granted to Australian carers. Before I commend the bills to the chamber, I would like to say that in his contribution Senator Fifield did quite a deal of rewriting of history regarding the Liberal Party’s contribution in this area. But I do welcome their support for this legislation. I commend these bills to the chamber.

Sue Boyce (Queensland, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I would also like to speak tonight on the Social Security Legislation Amendment (Improved Support for Carers) Bill 2009 and related bill. Firstly, I would like to recognise the many organisations and individuals who made submissions not just to the Who Cares ...? inquiry conducted by the House of Representatives but also to the inquiry of our Senate Standing Committee on Community Affairs. I am not sure that we appreciate or fully acknowledge the effort that is required by carers to come to a Senate committee hearing. If you are a carer under this legislation, you require someone else to do the looking after so that you can come along. Even writing a submission to the inquiry was difficult both in the time involved—just finding those spaces of time in which to write it—and emotionally for people to talk about their problems. As a number of other speakers have mentioned, carer support is an area of policy that touches thousands—millions—of families across Australia. These bills, which I am pleased to say are about ‘improved support’, are part of a continuum of changes since the 1970s and most recently in the late 1990s trying to improve the situation for people in Australia caring for people with disabilities.

Currently, to receive carer payment for a child the child needs to be found to be profoundly disabled. Whether you get access to support is based on that finding. I noted that the Parliamentary Secretary for Disabilities and Children’s Services, Mr Shorten, in the House of Representatives, commented that the current tests were too restrictive and inflexible. I would agree with that. One of the first meetings I attended after I joined the Senate, in May 2007, involved other senators and officials from Centrelink and FaHCSIA talking about the Adult Disability Assessment Tool and the Child Disability Assessment Tool. These changes in the assessment tools—and the changes in thinking that have come behind them—have probably been four to five years in the making. Aligning the carer payment with the type of care rather than using the strict medical definition of a disability is a major step forward and one that has been worked on and developed over at least the past four years. I do not think this is an issue where either party should claim superiority. It has been a gradually evolving area of thinking and assessment. I think it is an area that has an awfully long way yet to go.

The old disability assessment tools were based very much on the medical model—that is, if you had a disability, you were sick. We could look carefully and find this sickness, measure this sickness and therefore decide whether you were worthy of receiving help. Some of the problems with the old disability assessment tools included things like asking whether a child was able to feed itself. If you ticked that box, you would obviously come down the scale a bit. It did not ask you where the child would get the food to eat from. Obviously, a child feeding itself is one thing, but a child preparing a meal—sourcing food for itself—is something entirely different. That element of the care was not there. On the same basis, it might have asked you if a child could do up three buttons on a jacket. It did not ask whether the child was able to find a jacket by itself or whether the child would know by itself that it was hot or cold. In the old tool there was certainly a recognition of physical inability but not of developmental delay, intellectual disability or any of the many other aspects of disability.

As I said, we have moved forward, but we still have a long way to go. I note that we have at least extended the definition of a treating health professional. The previous system considered a treating health professional to be a doctor. When we thought that all disability was an illness, it was assumed that the parent of a child with a disability would be very closely in touch with their treating doctor and that their treating doctor would know them and their child very well. This, of course, was not the case with all disabilities. Certainly there are many well children who have disabilities. So people were forced to go to the local doctor to get the right boxes ticked on the assessment tool and often had to fill it in themselves and then ask the doctor to sign it because the doctor did not have a clue about the abilities or capabilities of the child being assessed.

I think probably one area where we have not yet grappled with the changes that need to be made is this sense of ambit claim that parents and other carers are forced into by filling in these forms. I think most people in the disability community would make a real effort to put their child’s abilities ahead of their child’s disabilities. But if you are going to pass this test you must set out to make your child out to be as bad as possible; you are setting out to fail as well as you possibly can so that you can become eligible for the funding. I am not sure how we address that issue, but I certainly think it is one we need to recognise in the sense that we are asking people to talk down their loved ones when they fill in these forms and not talk them up, which is what they very much try to do in the rest of their lives. I think that is something that we would welcome not just in the area of disability but across the board.

There are probably several other areas that we need to look at carefully here. We have talked about how in the past the medical model of disability was that it was sickness, but I think we also need to keep in mind that there is obviously a tension between the needs of people with disabilities and the needs of their carers. Their needs are obviously inextricably linked but they are not always the same. There is the potential for a conflict of interest between the needs of carers and the needs of people with disabilities. We must remember this and recognise it, whether we are talking about children or adults.

I saw an interview recently with a much loved Australian actor, the late Bud Tingwell, talking about the fact that he took, I think, 10 years out of his career to care for his wife and was a little surprised when one day someone, no doubt from a disability services background, referred to him as a carer. He said, ‘I did not think of myself as a carer. I was a husband doing what a husband should do for my much loved wife of more than 40 years.’ I think that is how all carers would like to see themselves, whether they be parents, foster parents or siblings—and the list goes on. But they have been forced into a position of having to become advocates not just for their children but for themselves by the way our society has quite happily used their free labour since the end of institutions without compensating them for—or even recognising, in many cases—what they have done. But I do not think that we should on that basis see the very genuine, very necessary and now very well-developed advocacy skills that carers have developed as competition to or as overshadowing the needs of people with disability, who in many cases do not have the same advocacy ability as carers.

I would like to think that we can continue down this track until we get to the stage where there is a genuine choice for parents and others who care for children with a disability. I noticed that Senator Siewert—and I certainly support her view—spoke about the fact that we now have for the first time a recognition that children with disabilities are just like other children. Some of them live in split, shared care between parents and some of them live at home with both their parents. Some of them live in all sorts of situations that, to them, represent family. So we need to continue the recognition of shared care. I find it somewhat bizarre to suggest that it would not be possible to change the rules around parenting payments so that they too could be split on the same basis that has made child support now a far more flexible payment and far more based on who does the caring. This would not seem to be a particularly difficult thing to do.

Of course, the assumption is still that having a child with a severe disability will mean that a parent cannot work. In my view, if we are going to do this properly, we need to get to the situation where parents have the same choices as anybody else irrespective of whether their child has a disability or not. I want to get the situation of saying that having a parent who wants to work and cannot because they have a child with a disability is a failure of our system and not a necessary requirement that we are putting onto them because we do not have sufficient paid support services to allow them to undertake work in the same way as other people can.

This, I think, is where we need to be heading. I think we are on the way. I am hoping that we can continue down this track far more vigorously than we are currently. Just as an example of how far we still have to go, I would like to share with you, finally, an email which I received today from a disability group talking about a consultation paper on women’s health being developed by the federal Department of Health and Ageing. This discussion paper was launched on March 12, but this organisation writes that they have now been given an extension for their response to the discussion paper until July 31. I will quote part of the email. It says:

... as the Department was unable to provide an accessible version of the Discussion paper (until today).

We are talking about just over three months that it has taken a federal government department to produce a paper that is accessible to people with disabilities so that they can comment on an issue that is of extreme relevance to people with disabilities. We are on the way but we are not there yet; and I would like to support the legislation.

Catryna Bilyk (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I also rise to speak on the Social Security Legislation Amendment (Improved Support for Carers) Bill 2009 and the Social Security Legislation Amendment (Improved Support for Carers) (Consequential and Transitional) Bill 2009. These very important bills arose from a review by the Carer Payment (child) Review Taskforce, which was instigated by the previous government in March 2007. The Rudd government has studied that review and agreed that carers deserve a greater level of support and, along with that acknowledgement, that the definition of carer needed to be changed. These bills reflect the government’s determination to support carers in the most difficult and demanding circumstances. The legislation gives effect to a number of measures aimed at improving assistance to carers from 1 July 2009 and has received wide-ranging support.

Carers play a vital role in Australian society and the Rudd government is committed to supporting them. Carers make huge sacrifices every day to look after their loved ones and this can place both a huge emotional and financial burden on them. Carers deserve all the support they can get to help them in their efforts to make the life of someone they care about easier and to help make their own lives a little easier as well. It is the government’s role to provide this support to ensure that people can continue on in their roles as carers. Creating security and certainty for the carers in our society, who work tirelessly to provide both emotional and practical assistance to the person in their care, is a key part of the reform. Carers often face considerable financial burdens and the government has recognised this in the budget changes.

I could speak for my full allotted time just about young carers—those wonderful young people who give up so much of their lives to care for people they love—the sacrifices they make, and the trials and tribulations that they go through. But my time is limited so I will keep this speech a bit more general and save that for another day. Carers come from all walks of Australian life and enter into the caring journey at various stages throughout their own life. We just heard Senator Boyce mention the recently deceased fine Australian actor Bud Tingwell. I had the pleasure of meeting Bud Tingwell at a carers launch a few months ago. It just shows the background that these people can come from. There is no prescribed background for people who become carers. It can hit people at any time in their lives. It is not something you can necessarily really prepare for.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics has identified that there are 350,000 Australians under the age of 25 who provide care to a family member who has a disability or a mental or chronic illness, with about 170,000 carers under the age of 18. But there are also over 454,000 carers over the age of 65 who undertake similar duties day to day—and quite often it is 24 hours a day and seven days a week. Nearly two million carers are of workforce age; but many have had to leave the workforce, reduce the hours they work or work below their skill capacity because of their caring responsibilities. Let us not forget that carers are the foundation of our aged and community care system. As part of the recent budget announcements, carer payment recipients will receive an increase as well as a new permanent carer supplement. Some $600 will be paid annually to people receiving the carers payment and there will be an extra $600 a year for people receiving the carers allowance. The $600 for the carers allowance will be given for each person in care. In addition to this the child disability assistance payment, worth $1,000 annually, will continue.

The illness, and especially the impending death, of a child is an experience I would not wish on anybody; but sadly many people suffer this traumatic loss as they watch their child battle illness. The Rudd government is doing everything possible to make life a little easier for people in this situation. We can make the suffering easier for those parents, dealing with the knowledge that their child is soon to die, and that is what we have done. Where children have a terminal illness there is a relaxation of the qualification rules. This will help ease the burden of working your way through the red tape of entitlements while at the same time trying to cope with the child’s illness. The current situation where the doctor must certify that the child has a terminal condition and is not expected to live considerably longer than a year will be replaced with a more general approach. The doctor will be able to assess the child’s illness based on the average life expectancy of children with the same or similar illness. This area has long been due for reform and I am pleased that the Rudd government has moved on this.

These bills also allow for carers to keep the carer payment or carer allowance when a child is in hospital. This is important as caring does not stop just because a child is in hospital receiving additional care, and neither do the costs. These changes should help ease some of the financial stress that carers go through and I welcome them. The reform will also make it easier for people to receive the carer payment (child). This will mean that people previously not eligible will have access to some valuable financial support.

The qualification criteria for payment under this legislation are fairer when it comes to determining who is a carer or not and so who is eligible for payment or not. Eligibility requirements will now focus on how much care the child needs rather than the limited set of medical and behavioural criteria that are currently in place. The measures contained in this legislation are included in the $822 million package made available in the 2008 budget to offer assistance to carers. As mentioned previously, these measures are being put in place in response to the report handed down by the Carer Payment (child) Review Taskforce. The task force found that the assessment process, which did not allow for flexibility, was resulting in inequitable outcomes.

The carer payment is available to people who are unable to undertake a substantial role in the workforce due to their commitments. As a result of these changes, an additional 19,000 carers will be eligible, taking the number of people receiving the payment to more than 26,000 from 1 July this year. The assessment will now be known as the disability care load assessment (child) and will improve both efficiency and effectiveness in even the most involved cases. This includes those situations where children have multiple carers, where carers have more than one person in their care and where carers are looking after both a child and an adult at the same time.

As well as the additional financial support, this legislation will see an improvement in the administration process, with easier claims processing and a dedicated team to deal with complex claims. The disability care load assessment will include a carer questionnaire as well as a medical practitioner questionnaire. The assessment will look at the functional ability, behaviour and special care needs for people under 16, as well as the level of care provided. The legislation will also allow for temporary situations where care is needed for recurring conditions lasting for at least three months but not exceeding six months. This provision will be able to be used for mental illness, cancer and brain injuries, just to give some examples. Short-term care will also apply for one-off incidents where care is needed for more than three months but less than six. As I have said, the government has also included a provision in the legislation to allow carers, in situations where the child in their care is hospitalised, to keep the carer payment and, in some cases, the carer allowance. Currently payment in these situations is limited to 63 days per calendar year. The new system will see the introduction of a 12-week review cycle.

This legislation also makes changes to some elements of the carer allowance in social security law. The carer allowance provides financial support to people who provide daily at-home care to a person who suffers from a physical, intellectual or psychiatric disability that is lasting and will affect the person for a lengthy period. The carer allowance is not means-tested and may be paid along with carer payments. People in receipt of the carer payment (child) will now be automatically eligible for the carer allowance.

Before I conclude I would like to mention that Senator Carol Brown, who spoke previously, talked about the unique issues with regard to Tasmanian carers, including our ageing population and the higher numbers of carers compared with other states. Once again, as there is a shortage of time this evening I will not repeat what Senator Carol Brown said, but I support all the things she mentioned.

In conclusion, I would like to reiterate that the Rudd government values the work of all Australian carers. To me, this is what being a politician is about—actually being able to make a difference to the day-to-day lives of those who really need our help. Even though parts of the bill are quite technical, it will put into action the provisions of the legislation. I am proud that the benefits will flow through to those who take on the caring role in our community. I know that the many challenges faced by carers will not end because of the changes we are making, but I do hope our actions help to make day-to-day life easier.

I would also like to acknowledge the work done by the Minister for Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs, the Hon. Jenny Macklin, and the Parliamentary Secretary for Disabilities, Mr Bill Shorten. Both Ms Macklin and Mr Shorten have worked hard to make long overdue changes in an effort to make life easier for carers. I have had the pleasure of attending various carer disability meetings with Mr Shorten when he has been in Tasmania and I know his commitment is deep and honestly felt. Carers have a demanding job and their lives are significantly changed when they undertake to look after a loved one. They need and deserve all the support they can get, both financially and emotionally. The Rudd government is committed to ensuring that the assistance required is provided and will remain committed to this.

I am pleased the Rudd government has made considerable progress in this area. I believe that this legislation, along with other measures that the Rudd government is implementing, will help ease the longstanding disadvantage that these wonderful people have experienced. I commend the legislation to the chamber.

Gary Humphries (ACT, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to 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.

Steve Fielding (Victoria, Family First Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Firstly, I will declare an interest in the Social Security Legislation Amendment (Improved Support for Carers) (Consequential and Transitional) Bill 2009 and the Social Security Legislation Amendment (Improved Support for Carers) Bill 2009: I have an intellectually disabled sister, and my parents are carers 24/7 still. I am sure there are many other members in this parliament that could probably claim the same thing too, so I am not trying to say anything special about that. But certainly, anyone who is a carer is doing a tremendous job and mostly under very strenuous and difficult circumstances.

Australians love their sporting heroes. Our children revere them and idolise their every move, while as adults we pin the hopes of the nation on them and share in all their successes. In fact, we love them so much that out of the 49 times that the Australian of the Year award has been bestowed on an individual, on 11 occasions it has gone to a sports star. As I glanced at the list of recipients of this award, I also saw scientists, entertainers, environmentalists and business people, each one a role model for all Australians. But one thing that did stand out from among this list was the absence of a group of ordinary Australians whose contribution to society has touched so many. By this I mean those people who act as carers for those in need. They are the unsung heroes. Maybe they are not given the Australian of the Year award but they are, in every way, deserving. They do not get any glory or tickertape parades. In many cases, they have more reasons to cry than to celebrate. They do not ask for rewards or grand recognition; what they do ask for, however, is a fair go.

That is what this Social Security Legislation Amendment (Improved Support for Carers) Bill 2009 is about. It is about making life easier for those who have enough on their mind as it is. It is about going some small way towards helping those people who spend their days helping others. Family First supports the amendments to the Social Security Act and the Social Security (Administration) Act put forward in this bill and sees them as a positive first step to improving support for carers. Family First is particularly pleased that this bill deals specifically with carers who look after children, given that almost one quarter of all primary carers help children with a disability, and almost two thirds of these carers spend at least 40 hours per week in their caring role. The changes proposed will mean that more people will become eligible for carer payments. These income support payments are by no means adequate compensation for the care provided in many cases but they do go some way towards alleviating the financial burden imposed on those who are unable to support themselves through participation in the workforce.

I want to highlight the changes to the qualification rules for those caring for children with a terminal illness as something which particularly pleases me. Under the current laws, carers—in many cases a parent—are required to get a medical professional to certify that the child with a terminal illness will not live substantially longer than 12 months. For a highly civilised society, this is a highly uncivilised way of doing business. It is hard to even begin to imagine the trauma of having to care for a child with a terminal illness. I have three children of my own and being in such a situation would, no doubt, be my biggest nightmare. I welcome the new changes to the qualification rules, which are far less intrusive and demonstrate far greater compassion.

Family First also welcomes the changes that will see carer payments being granted to those looking after children under the age of 16 who require care on an episodic basis. Having a child who requires care for a period of at least three months can be an incredible burden on a family member and it is important that carer payments be extended to include these situations. Family First supports this bill and will continue to support all future endeavours by the government to improve the conditions of carers in our community.

Chris Evans (WA, Australian Labor Party, Leader of the Government in the Senate) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank all senators for their contributions and their broad support around the chamber for this legislation. The Social Security Legislation Amendment (Improved Support for Carers) Bill 2009 will extend the qualification for carer payment to around 19,000 more carers from 1 July. It will deliver a new, fairer set of qualifications and criteria for carer payment paid in respect of a child based on the level of care required rather than the rigid medical criteria currently used to assess qualifications for the payment. I think we have all dealt with people—I know I certainly did when I was the shadow spokesman—who are very unfairly affected by the current methods of calculation.

The report of the Carer Payment (child) Review Taskforce: A New Approach was released last year finding primarily that the qualification criteria for carer payment paid in respect of a child were too restrictive and the assessment process overly rigid, producing inequitable outcomes. This bill is part of the government’s response to the report of the taskforce and highlights the government’s commitment to improving the level of assistance for carers of children with a disability or medical conditions. The new measures are part of an $822 million package from the 2008 budget to support and recognise carers, as well as the 2008 one-off payments and the amendments to the carer legislation included in this bill, which is worth about $273 million over five years. The government set aside $100 million for supported accommodation facilities for people with disability whose aging parents can no longer care for them at home and $20 million for carers who have experienced a catastrophic event involving a young child. This bill makes amendments in relation to carer payment paid in respect of a child or children with a disability or medical conditions. These measures will provide a more flexible and accessible income support payment for Australians facing some of the toughest circumstances.

I would like to congratulate Ms Macklin, the minister, for the excellent work she and her staff have done in bringing forward this package. This has been an issue that has needed far better treatment for a long time. All senators appreciate that this is a big step forward and it is a credit to the work Ms Macklin has done in the area since taking on the portfolio.

In response to an issue that Senator Siewert raised seeking assurances on the question of the government’s intentions regarding aligning carer payment (adult) assessment to carer payment (child) assessment, the minister has indicated that she is committed to further consultation with relevant bodies and to conducting further research in how we can best improve the carer experience and access to appropriate payments and allowances. Further research is currently being undertaken by FaHCSIA around further alignment of assessment tools and this should lead to further improvements to the carer process from 2010. An example of this focus will be to look at further improving the experience of transition for carers and care receivers moving from child to adult recognition.

The future reform agenda for carers will be informed by the recently tabled House of Representatives Standing Committee on Family, Community, Housing and Youth report, Who cares...?, which detailed the inquiry into better support for carers. The recommendations of that report have been examined and considered at this time.

I conclude by thanking senators for their contribution and I look forward, following the committee stage, to this legislation being carried and to us seeing these improved conditions for carers applied from 1 July 2009.

Question agreed to.

Bills read a second time.