The ACT Council of Social Service (ACTCOSS) wants the Commonwealth to adequately fund services provided by the community sector, including aged care, disability, homelessness, and domestic violence services, and appropriately remunerate the community sector workforce at regularly and adequately indexed rates to keep up with the cost of living.
The community sector was one of the two fastest growing industries in Australia, but it was undervalued. ACTCOSS, Dr Emma Campbell, ACTCOSS CEO, said at a recent forum for Federal election candidates, represented one of the largest – but also one of the most underpaid and undervalued – workforces in the ACT, which supported some of the most vulnerable people in the community.
“It’s not easy work to deliver services to people with disability, to people of older age, to people with complex needs. It takes incredible skill. And we want to be respected.”
Similarly, ACTCOSS also wanted “the freedom to say what we see on the ground and [to] share [it] with governments, so that you can make the right policies to take care of people that we support and represent”.
Labor has committed to a pay rise for aged care workers and nurses 24/7 in aged care centres. Dr Andrew Leigh MP, member for Fenner, acknowledged there had been “huge neglect” in the sector:
“People who are towards the end of their lives are suffering malnutrition and undertreatment.”
Dr Leigh has also said Labor would make sure funding was adequate, end short-term funding, and scrap gag clauses and restore community sector workers’ freedom to advocate.
The Greens have promised increased, guaranteed, long-term funding for the community sector, and to establish a committee to advise ministers.
“The community sector has never been funded enough,” Dr Tjanara Goreng Goreng, Greens Senate candidate, told CW. “It does most of the work of taking care of people in the community, and the Commonwealth ought to provide a lot more funding.”
Dr Goreng Goreng, a former community development worker, said the lack of funding for the community sector was shocking. She had witnessed severe cutbacks over the last 20 years, including to disability services like the NDIS and women’s refuges.
“It was really an attack on feminism … and really destroyed our ability to take care of family violence and domestic violence,” she told CW.
The system needed to be better funded and resourced enough to focus on early intervention, David Pocock, Independent Senate candidate, argued; better resources for mental health, housing, women’s health, and the NDIS would have huge flow-on effects for the community.
Labor and Independent Senate candidate Kim Rubenstein have also committed to support the NDIS.
Read more:
- Federal candidates address social priorities at ACTCOSS forum
- Candidates respond to ACTCOSS call to increase income support
- Housing security a priority for Federal candidates
- ACTCOSS calls for fair, fast, inclusive climate action
- ACTCOSS wants justice for First Nations people
- ACTCOSS calls for more taxes on wealthy
