Comment
Budget relief for home care services but thin elsewhere
The 2000 Federal Budget has brought relief for home care services for older Australians but residential care remains largely untouched. VERONICA SHEEN, COTA’s national policy officer reports on these and other Budget measures.
The pressures on home and community care (HACC) services, which the Council on the Ageing (COTA) has been asking the Government to address in the past few years, may at last be eased as a result of measures in the May Federal Budget.
The Government has started a new programme called the Veterans Home Care Program which will provide home support services to veterans holding Gold and White cards who are assessed as needing care. This new programme will mean that around 20,000 additional places in HACC for non-veterans are likely to become available. In addition, the Government is putting $40 million – around six per cent growth - into HACC this year to help to meet the need in the community.
For COTA, these are very satisfying developments on an issue that has been of great concern to us for the past two to three years. However, nursing homes did not come out of the Budget as well as we would have liked.
COTA is still receiving calls of concern about the level of care in nursing homes. Improvements to the aged care standards and accreditation agency is a start but will not provide the additional nursing staff or activities programmes that are urgently needed in many nursing homes. There is still no overall information strategy for consumers.
As to be expected, rural and regional issues were high on the government’s priority list for this budget. COTA welcomed the initiatives to revitalise bush nursing and small regional hospitals. Older people want facilities near their homes. Likewise, increased allied health services attached to general practice are welcome.
COTA’s priority policy area of older workers received a token recognition in the Budget with the Mature Age Participation Pilot Program. There are few details as to how this experimental programme will be run but it seems it will be aimed at identifying and overcoming the barriers faced by older people in the work force.
COTA is pleased by the recognition in the pilot of the problems faced by people who are ineligible for income support due to the harsh social security means test, often because they have received a redundancy payment. This group has also been excluded from labour market assistance. COTA will be seeking to build on this initiative in reforming policy for this group and other mature age unemployed, as this has been a major area of our policy work in the past 12 months.
Another positive measure in the Budget is the protection for older people who were likely to miss out on receiving an Australian age pension due to the termination of the social security agreement with the UK. COTA advocated that all people presently in Australia should be excluded from any effect of the termination. It is pleasing that the Government has taken our advice on this issue.
The Budget includes two initiatives that COTA will be watching carefully in terms of their effects on older people:
• the removal of nasal sprays from the Pharmaceuticals Benefits Scheme so that these will no longer be available at the concessional price of $3.30.
• changes to the Hearing Services Programme which mean that people will have to wait two years instead of one for reassessment and five years instead of four for hearing aid refitting.
Altogether, it was a modest Budget for older Australians. COTA starts its lobbying for next year’s pre-election Budget in coming months.
