Recommendations made for the principles of the new aged care system.
A safe, high quality and sustainable aged care system is dependent on the workforce that delivers care. This submission focuses on measures that will enable the aged care workforce to grow and to adapt continuously.
There are currently over 128,500 people waiting for home care packages in Australia, with average wait times of between 6 to 9 months (Department of Health, 2018b). Responding to the ongoing growth in demand for home care packages through the piecemeal increases in funded places does not provide women requiring care or providing informal care support with the certainty of support they require.
The National Foundation of Australian Women, NFAW, is a non-politically aligned feminist organisation committed to examining the potentially differential impact of policies and their outcomes for men and women and whether the consequences of policies, intended or unintended adversely affect women. ,The aged care workforce is an area of major policy interest to NFAW on four grounds.
NFAW has a strong policy of support for women to make their own life choices – to choose to be a home maker, to choose to do paid work, to choose part time work if that is a real choice. Responsibility for bearing and rearing children, rightly or wrongly falls mostly on women.
While the well-being of employees is a reasonable point of departure, the Commission takes as its unit of analysis the male employee, arguing that current labour standards should not be modified to accommodate the needs of feminised ‘groups’ of workers because this may lead employers to discriminate against women.
The National Foundation for Australian Women (NFAW), a non-politically aligned feminist organisation, in conjunction with experts from a range of women’s organisations, has prepared this submission to the Productivity Commission’s (the Commission) inquiry into the workplace relations framework.
The National Foundation for Australian Women (NFAW), having given evidence to a hearing of the Commission, undertook to bring some further information to the Commission. We will not comment on every issue raised in the Interim Report. Our specific submissions are set out below.
If parental workforce participation is a major goal of Government policies, then child care is but one of an inter-related suite of policies which must be coordinated. Reformation of child care alone will not produce solutions.
