Aged Care Legislation Amendment (Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Aged Care Commissioner and Other Measures) Bill 2026

Mr McCORMACK (Riverina) (11:01): For communities across the Riverina, the electorate I proudly serve, aged care is not some sort of conceptual debate. It affects every family in Wagga Wagga and every town and village. Older residents across this country, particularly in regional areas, shouldn't be disadvantaged simply because there isn't the availability or access to aged care.

I heard the member for Barton talking about her own electorate. She mentioned Hurstville and other areas—St George—and, yes, I agree that this is an urban issue as well; one that affects people in metropolitan Australia. But, certainly, when it comes to regional and especially remote Australia, aged care is so important.

I've just finished giving a speech in the House of Representatives about access and availability to childcare services, and what we're discussing in the Federation Chamber is the other end of the spectrum. Riverina families are already facing workforce shortages, long waiting times and limited service availability in the aged-care sector. It compounds when you have a childcare sector that those issues are prevalent in as well.

Any changes to the aged-care system must make life easier, not more difficult. The Aged Care Legislation Amendment (Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Aged Care Commissioner and Other Measures) Bill 2026, as the member for Barton has just said, has the support of the major parties. I'll be interested to see where a particular party that is polling well at the moment goes with this bill.

Who would know? Who, quite frankly, would know? But we support, as the coalition—as Liberals and Nationals—an aged-care system that delivers efficiency, fairness and dignity.

The establishment of an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander aged-care commissioner is a step towards ensuring culturally appropriate aged-care services on country and in some of Australia's most far-flung places. I was in the Northern Territory last week talking with veterans; moreover, listening to them. I've been right around the country doing just that but particularly in the Northern Territory.

I will say, Deputy Speaker Lawrence, given you are the member for Hasluck and I have the member for O'Connor here as well, in Western Australia, they're such big places. If you're in Kalgoorlie or, dare I say, Tennant Creek or Katherine or Alice Springs, access and availability to aged care is so important and, certainly, having the right provisions for our Indigenous Australians is also so very crucial.

I know the former member for Parkes, Mark Coulton, used to say a lot that he represented more Aborigines than he did farmers in his sprawling western New South Wales electorate. When you have places such as Wilcannia and elsewhere, like Narrabri, you need to have good aged-care services. The same goes for Riverina.

Not that long ago, I was very pleased to have an aged-care forum there, at which there was input from my local Indigenous people. Certainly, when it comes to aged care, I was most impressed with the advocacy by John Knight and Ross Tout from Uralba at Gundagai. I know the Whiddon group has been especially forward-leaning in its advocacy for better aged-care services in Temora and have received government grants under both the coalition and Labor governments, and I welcome those.

But people in country Australia shouldn't be left waiting, certainly not indefinitely, for decisions that affect their care and their quality of life. Accountability has to remain at the heart and the centre of the aged-care system. This bill has a number of facets to it.

Schedule 1 establishes the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Aged Care Commissioner within the Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission, and this gives effect to recommendation 49 of the Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety and responds to the interim First Nations Aged Care Commissioner's consultation report. For schedule 2, under system modification rules, part 1 of the bill amends the act, and part 2 amends the Aged Care Rules 2025.

These amendments cover matters such as: reinstating home-support priority categories where uptake periods are missed; enabling payment of provider subsidies where a provider cannot claim through regular channels; aligning the timing of the individual contribution rate variations in line with decisions made under other Commonwealth laws and legislation; introducing a formal notice process before a provider report; changing triggers for a review of someone's asset determination, and that is really, really vital; and mandating providers' reporting of refundable deposits and accommodation contribution balances.

Schedule 3 is technical by nature. It contains 13 further machinery amendments, including definitions of such things as direct-care staff member and responsible persons. I do note that one aspect of the royal commission into aged care, certainly when it comes to responsible persons and those people who are in and around aged—only anecdotally—was that volunteers should always be welcomed into aged-care centres.

I appreciate that these days you can't just take a volunteer's home baking and serve it up to the clients. They have to know what's in it—the nutrients, ingredients and everything else. But our volunteers, certainly in country areas, have provided such wonderful service over so many years.

Indeed, the aged-care centres themselves are often run by community volunteers working in an incorporated, not-for-profit group, and it is difficult to make ends meet. One of the provisions and the findings of the aged-care royal commission was 24/7 registered nursing. Now, you take an aged-care centre at a town such as Junee.

It's only 42 kilometres from Wagga Wagga. It's a big country city, the largest inland city in regional New South Wales. They found it so difficult to find registered nurses, because they had fewer than 20 clients, but to have around-the-clock RNs for 20 clients, you just about needed five-to-seven full-timers to cover maternity leave, holidays, sick leave and all the rest.

And that did eat into the profits and the financial capabilities of these country aged-care centres, which do an amazing and wonderful job. I know the aged-care centre at Harden-Murrumburrah was forced to close for awhile and send its clients elsewhere—it might have been only 100 or so kilometres away to other nearby centres such as Young. It's less than 100 kilometres to Young, but often our country centres in New South Wales are 100 kilometres apart.

The moment that you that you take those people who have been in aged-care centres and ship them off, for want of a better word, to places 100 or so kilometres away, they lose the familiar faces. They lose the day-to-day links with their loved ones. It really is not a good thing.

So we do need to provide better and more services for our older Australians. I do note that we have and certainly did have around the time of the budget 48,000 older Australians stuck on a triage waiting list. Now, many vulnerable older Australians waiting up to a year, if not longer, to receive home-care packages.

I know that in my office this is one of the most pressing and emotional things. Even in the weight of the number of calls that comes in to my electorate office in Wagga Wagga, families are worried about accessing home-care packages. I have to say a new report by the government was quietly released on the same day as the budget this year.

Now that's unfortunate. The timing was terrible. Often you will find governments will do this.

They bring out these reports when it just gets subsumed and taken up by the bigger issue of the day, such as the budget. We know that one of the upcoming RBA decisions will come out on Melbourne Cup Day, and that's always the way. It's the first Tuesday in November, but it just seems to get lost in the process.

The timing is sometimes terrible. In the order of governments, it's sometimes it's sometimes desirable. But people looking for residential aged-care placements, according to this report, can expect to wait even longer—even over 12 months for those placements.

The report triggered a complete wave of criticism from advocates for older Australians—and that should be all of us, quite frankly. People argued that lengthy waits could worsen existing conditions. And this does go against everything that the Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety recommended.

Now, I know that, at the time, the shadow minister for aged care, Senator Anne Ruston from South Australia, who I've got a lot of time for, said the government had tried to bury the report and made the point that it was 'quietly dumping the data in the middle of budget lock-up, hoping Australians wouldn't notice'. Well, Australians did notice, unfortunately for the Minister for Health and Ageing.

It probably seemed oblivious to him, but what Senator Ruston did add was that Labor's approach to the waitlist crisis was built on tragedy. Sadly, it has been tragic. It truly has.

Without new packages, the only way the waitlist will come down is by banking on older Australians either moving into residential care or dying. Tragically, 5,000 have already died waiting, she said, and that is so sad. When you add the Indigenous component to that, it just adds to what I would say is a crisis.

And so having a commissioner, having this bill and having the contents therein are important, and I welcome the member for Lingiari. In my contribution about child care, I referred to her electorate and I referred to her advocacy because she represents many Indigenous communities and they do need the very best support from this place. Canberra is a long, long way from the Northern Territory, and, indeed, sometimes the policies that this place brings about as legislation are a long way removed from my electorate, which happens these days to wrap right around Canberra.

But aged care, and Indigenous aged care particularly, is of critical importance because there are greater challenges within our Aboriginal communities—within the Wiradjuri community and other communities that I represent. Whether it's Ngunnawal, Ngambri, Wiradjuri or whatever Aboriginal nation, we certainly need to make sure that we provide the support and the provisions to enable older Indigenous Australians to have aged care of as good a quality as that of anyone else.

If this legislation can do that, then that is very, very good. I note that this does have a time constraint on it—that being the end of October. I note that, according to the papers, the bill has no financial impact.

That is well and good. Certainly, though, we do need to do better in the aged care space, and the minister certainly needs to take heed of that. The DEPUTY SPEAKER ( Ms Lawrence ): I understand the member for Pearce would like to present a copy of their speech for incorporation into Hansard, in accordance with the resolution agreed to on 6 November 2025.