Mr. Peter Broadhead:

Workforce has been a challenge. We are lucky that we have got a reasonable workforce. The biggest expansion has been in personal care workers - people providing assistance with activities of daily living. The Chairman mentioned geography. We have some shortages in some types of therapies here and there depending on which part of the country one is in. In Australia we have always had a challenge in any form of provision when we get out into our remote areas. That is a continuing challenge. We have a phrase, "thin markets", which basically means that people do not have sufficient choice of providers in those areas. We have thin market strategies where we try to encourage people into those areas. Fortunately, we have some large-scale providers that will take steps to move their workforce into areas that are underserved. It is still a continuing challenge, partly because it has been such a big expansion. If we had only taken what we did before and re-engineered it and provided the same level, the workforce would be there but it has been a significant expansion.

A website was built that modelled small local areas. We took data from people who were participating that anticipated the funding we were giving and the kind of services they would require. The website can map small areas and predict how many workers we can expect to be required in that area. Because it is a market-based model, it is about trying to give service providers sight of where they have opportunities to expand. Because it has been expanding for some years, there is some gearing up, workforce training and so on. The training institutions in our country see this as an opportunity. People see it as an opportunity to get work. There is a lag and there are challenges but over time the workforce is expanding. I mentioned earlier that we still need to bring in another 83,000 workers to meet what we expect to be the level of demand going forward.