Government programs – human services
In the shoes (and PPE) of an aged care worker
A budgeting thought experiment.
Your weekly income is $773.
You’re paying $425 rental a week for a unit.
Your work requires you to work odd hours, at different locations, and at hours when public transport is unavailable. You therefore have to own and run a car.
What you have left over has to pay for everything else – food, utilities, clothing, and out-of-pocket health care costs. Forget about entertainment or travel.
That’s the basic budget of an aged-care worker, described in a report It’s time to care about aged careprepared by the Australian Aged Care Collaboration, summarised by a press release Cost of living pressure pushing aged care workers to the brink of poverty line, fuelling workforce shortage on the Leading Age Services Australia website, which also has a link to the full report in PDF format. And they’re the figures for a single person, without the expenses of bringing up children.
The Collaboration is calling for a basic set of workplace-related reforms in the aged care sector, to ensure that workers are paid enough to stay in the sector. It is also calling for other reforms that will ensure that aged Australians are served by a well-trained, well-paid multidisciplinary workforce.
Without such a workforce it will be impossible for any government to ensure older Australians are provided with “timely high-quality support and care in accordance with assessed need” as recommended by the Commission into aged care quality and safety.
The Commonwealth has promised aged care workers an $800 bonus, but this is only in (partial) recognition of the disproportionate burden they bore during the pandemic. It is once-off, and does not address the ongoing problem of underpayment. Aged care providers and unions have struck a deal in a case before the Fair Work Commission, and are jointly arguing for a substantial wage increase, but apart from providing the Commission with some technical input, the Commonwealth has not made a submission to the inquiry, even though the Commonwealth has substantial responsibility for funding aged care.
Because during the pandemic there has been a disproportionately high number of deaths in aged-care homes, and because the Morrison government’s inept administration of vaccination had particularly adverse effects on aged-care residents and staff, the pandemic has brought to prominence the problem of underpayment in aged care. But it is a general issue in all labour-intensive government services, including health care, child care, education and policing – services in which there is limited scope to replace labour with capital as has occurred in most industries served by private markets. This means that if we are to maintain these services at their current level, we will have to pay more for them, not just in absolute dollar terms, but also as a proportion of the GDP – a phenomenon known as the “Baumol effect”. In the medium to long term, unless our governments free themselves from the self-imposed shackle of limiting taxes as a share of GDP, the standard of these services will go on deteriorating.
The economics of aged care – good profits if you cut your services
Writing in The Conversation Hal Swerissen of La Trobe University explains the economics of the aged care industry in Australia. The title – Quality costs more. Very few aged care facilities deliver high quality care while also making a profit – summarizes his article. Private for-profit organizations, which operate a third of aged care services, manage to make a profit by keeping costs down, and in this labour-intensive industry that means providing limited care to residents. (See the previous article.) They also try to gain the benefits of scale economies by operating large establishments, which provide less flexible and less personalized services.
Swerissen is critical of the Commonwealth’s neoliberal approach to aged care: “In theory, the introduction of private operators promotes market competition. Competition should improve efficiency while maintaining quality. In practice, there is little evidence this is true.”
Mapping child care
The ABC’s Digital Story Innovation Team has an infographic Mapping Australia’s childcare blackspots based on data from the Mitchell Institute for Education and Health Policy, showing locations where centre-based day care is plentiful (“oases”) and locations where there is a large imbalance between the number of children and the number of places available (“deserts”) – including many areas where there are no child care centres at all. The Mitchell Institute study compares supply and potential demand for child care in 57 400 neighbourhoods and Australia’s 8 700 childcare centres.
Their maps of child care availability are juxtaposed against maps of other variables – socioeconomic advantage, households speaking only English at home, education and occupation. Child care is most available where people are most well-off, and female workforce participation is highest where child care is most plentiful, particularly inner-city areas.
They quote University of Melbourne sociologist Lea Ruppanner on how we should see child care – not as “social expenditure” but as an economic investment:
Accessible, affordable, high-quality child care — that’s the trifecta that needs to come together to move the dial on women’s employment. … We’ve got to start thinking about child care as infrastructure — like water, electricity, internet, and public schools … We think of it as babysitting or child minding but it’s actually early education. The learning gap is set at age three, so child care is one of the best investments we can make for minimising class-based educational gaps.
Economists will be intrigued by their scatter diagrams of child care fees against the number of children per place showing that where supply is most plentiful, fees are the highest. Markets aren’t supposed to behave like this. It’s a case of price responding to people’s capacity to pay – high “income elasticity” in economists’ terminology.
If Australian education standards are slipping, let’s blame the teachers
A reader with a long-standing interest in education has brought to our attention a speech by acting education minister Stuart Robert given at an independent schools event, in which he repeated the mantra about the virtue of private schools, and actually celebrated the fact that parents are abandoning public schools. We hear that line so often that we have forgotten that the Liberal Party is actually valorising class division and tribalization.
The most contentious aspect of his speech was an implication that state schools are held back by the presence of dud teachers. He hinted that the state school system needed a dose of decimation (in the original sense), involving sacking the 10 percent of poorest performers:
So why don't we face the brutal reality that we have got to arrest the quality of our teaching, if we are going to make a difference when it comes to it and stop pussyfooting around the fact that the problem is the protection of teachers that don't want to be there; that aren't up to the right standard; that are graduating from university or have been for the last 10 years and they can't read and write. They can't pass the LANTITE test. [Literacy and numeracy test for initial teacher education.].
That brought a strong response from Rachel Wilson of the University of Sydney, who wrote on the EduResearch Matters blog What do you think we’ve got now? Dud teachers or a dud minister? Here are the facts. She points out that there is no evidence that the quality of teachers in state schools is declining. The real problem in school education is inequity: Australia now ranks down at position 30 out of 38 “developed” countries in educational inequity, and both the OECD and UNICEF see school segregation as a key weakness in Australian schooling. This results from inadequate funding and from “school choice” policies.
The following day Anne Sullivan, form the University of South Australia, responding to the same statement by Stuart Robert, wrote on the same blog Why is the acting minister trying to damage Australian education?. She is concerned that the minister’s unsubstantiated claims about public education, conveying the impression that it’s a residual welfare system staffed by second-rate teachers, contributes to “de-professionalisation of teachers’ work and a lack of trust in the work teachers do”.
(We might ask how members of the Coalition cabinet would perform on the LANTITE test. They have displayed a dismal ignorance of scientific method, of basic roles of logical reasoning, and of elementary mathematical concepts such as compound growth. Based on his quote above, Robert, for one, may not make the grade.)