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House of Assembly - Fifty-Second Parliament, Second Session (52-2)
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Parliamentary Committees

SELECT COMMITTEE ON A REVIEW OF THE RETIREMENT VILLAGES ACT 1987

The Hon. J.D. HILL (Kaurna) (17:10): I move:

That the report be noted.

It is with great pleasure that I move this on the second to last sitting day of the year, and my last ever speech in relation to any report, or any motion, or notion, before this parliament, and it is absolutely fitting that it is about retirement, so I am very pleased to be able to do it.

Mr Speaker, I commend, on behalf of the committee which reviewed this piece of legislation, the report that is before you. I would like to thank the members of the committee and assure the house that this was unanimously agreed to. All of the recommendations—all 34 of them—were agreed to unanimously by the committee, so I think that is a fine outcome. We worked assiduously to reach this position, so I do thank my colleagues for their support and for their assistance.

This was a suggestion that was put to the house by the honourable health minister that we look at this legislation. In the course of several months since the motion was moved we had a series of meetings where we met as many people who wanted to meet us, and we received submissions from a variety of people, particularly those, of course, representing the providers of retirement villages and the users of retirement villages. We also heard from a range of government instrumentalities, the Residential Tenancies Tribunal, for example, the Valuer-General and some others. We looked at this in the broadest possible context and, as I say, we came to unanimous conclusions.

I will not go through all 34 of the recommendations, the house will be pleased to know, but I would like to make some general observations and talk about some of the more interesting and important of the recommendations. I think it would be of interest to the house to note that there are currently—this is from page 1 of the report itself—over 500 registered retirement villages in South Australia, and they accommodate about 24,200 residents. The number of villages and the demand for their services are expected to increase significantly, particularly with the baby boomer generation approaching retirement age.

I think that is the key fact that we need to keep in mind as we think through how we need to properly manage and regulate retirement villages. South Australia has about twice the national average in terms of people using retirement villages compared to those who could potentially use retirement villages. I think it is about 10 per cent in our state compared to about 5 per cent elsewhere. That says to me that retirement village living is popular in South Australia and that it must be going pretty well if we have twice the national average.

What we found is that generally the individuals who live in retirement villages are pretty happy in retirement villages. They like the social interaction, they like the relative security, and they like the carefree environment. They pretty well enjoy where they are living. That is not the case for all, but that is generally the case. They have a number of problems with the administrative and contractual arrangements that have applied to them, and it is really to those issues that this report turns.

I think it is also fair to note that the operators of retirement villages, who are represented principally in South Australia by the Property Council, believe that things are going pretty well and they do not want to see a lot of change. They particularly did not want to see a change which would mean that we would recommend a common contract or a standard contract be applied, and we did not pick up that idea, though it has been pursued by a number of the submissions.

The way the report is structured I think helps anybody reading it to understand what the issues are. We have structured the report into four chapters. The first chapter really is about the issues associated with retirement villages prior to somebody entering a contract with a retirement village. The second chapter deals with the period in which the contract is operational, that is, while a person is living in a retirement village. The third part is at the termination of the contract, either through death or somebody moving on to another institution or out of a retirement village for whatever reason. The fourth chapter is to do with other matters.

Before I go into some of the recommendations, I think the key point that people listening to my comments need to understand is that, when people enter into a retirement village, generally, though this is not exclusively the case, they are buying a licence to occupy a particular property. They are not buying the property and that licence comes with a whole lot of strings attached. It gives benefits, but there are also costs, and those costs cannot be avoided.

I think we found as a committee that there was a lot of confusion and misunderstanding about those costs and that, in fact, some people believed they actually owned the property. Then when it was sold they expected to get the capital gain and not have to share it to the extent they do with the owner or operator of the village, so there were a lot of issues around that which we hope this report, if it were implemented, would address.

I will just go through some of the key recommendations—at least the ones that I think are key. Other members I know will talk, notably the member for Heysen, who I am sure will have a few things to say as well and I would encourage her to do so.

In the first section, which was 'Before moving into a village', we wanted to make sure that the term 'retirement village' properly referred to villages under this act, because we became aware that some organisations were using that language, but they were applying to other entities which were not protected by the retirement villages legislation. That created confusion in the community, and we wanted to make sure that confusion was addressed.

We also wanted to include provisions to prevent misleading and deceptive advertising, and I think this is particularly important. One of the operators who gave evidence to us we noted had advertising in newspapers circulating in South Australia which talked about the sale of a property when, in fact, they knew and we knew that they were not purchasing a property. The potential purchasers were purchasing a licence to occupy a property, and it is that fundamental distinction which needs to be made clear to the community.

The second recommendation I think is an interesting one, too. We agree that retirement villages should remain available for people over the age of 55, but we reject the idea that they should be exclusively for people who are retired because, as the Productivity Commission's report indicated a few days ago, people will not be able to retire, and there are a lot of people who do not want to retire when they move into a retirement village.

We could see no good reason why we should have policies in place which would encourage people who want to work to not work, so we would recommend that that element be removed so retirement villages could be for anybody over the age of 55. We think that age is appropriate, although the evidence is that people are generally much older than that before they, in fact, do move into retirement villages.

Of course, that really leads to the question about what should these villages be called if they are not for retired people, and our wit was not sufficient to come up with an easy answer, but no doubt others will be able to apply their mind to it. So, that is the first bit that I wanted to talk about.

Recommendation 4 deals with pre-contract disclosure and this is, I think, the most important part of the recommendations. We were absolutely clear from the evidence that was given that many people sign up to these dreams, to these lifestyle dreams, to this way of living which is very attractive to them, without really understanding the nuts and bolts of what they have signed up to; without really understanding the detail of what they have signed up to.

So, we have spent a lot of time as a committee thinking through how we should fix or address this, and one of the things that we recommend is a standard disclosure document which is prescribed by regulations which says exactly what it is that a person is signing up to. We did not try and say to the operators of the villages, 'You can't do this, but you can do that.'

We said, 'Look, let the marketplace determine what it is you are offering as long as the consumers or the potential consumers understand exactly what it is in plain English language and using standard terms, so that the potential consumer can compare one village with another village to make sure that the products that they are comparing are easily understood.'

There is a lot that we have had to say in relation to that and, in particular, the standard disclosure document should include information relating to all fees and charges which residents will be responsible for at those three key periods—before entering the village, while residing in a village and upon leaving a village.

There should be examples of exit fee scenarios; definitions of fees, charges and funds; any circumstances under which a resident will be required to fund a budget deficit; frequently asked questions; and any interest an administering authority has in services used within the village, for example, the provision of electricity or internet services. We saw some evidence of I guess what you might call gaming, or perhaps sharp practices, in some places.

We also recommend that a web-based calculator be developed so that potential purchasers of licences can put the information in and compare one product with another, and have a really good understanding. I think the reality is that, once you get into a retirement village and once you sign up and have been there for a few years, the cost of extracting yourself from a retirement village are so great that it makes it almost impossible for a resident to move into an equivalent space anywhere else. Once you make that decision you really are locked in unless you are individually wealthy.

We also recommended to the Property Council that they might produce a set of proforma contracts that their members could use. We stopped short of recommending that there should be proforma contracts, but we thought that if the industry itself was to come up with some, in the same way the real estate industry does, that would probably help everyone.

Recommendations 5 and 6, I won't deal with; they deal with premise condition reports and payment of premium. Recommendation 7 is important because it requires that any person or entity who receives an amount as a premium under a residence contract will be required to hold this premium in trust. There was an example of a case, which I think may or may not be before the courts at the moment, where, at a particular retirement village, a number of potential residents sold property or passed title over to the proponent.

The proponent got money from the bank and put that money into an account on the promise that people gave over the title and the promise that they would get a retirement village accommodation and that was never provided. So, they lost their money, they lost their house, and they effectively became homeless. A number of our provisions try and make sure that that does not happen again. So that is before the retirement village is signed, and now, in chapter 2, we talk about living in a retirement village.

One of the issues that had been brought to our attention was the status of residents committees: should they be incorporated associations, or should they not? We have come to the recommendation that they should have the same protections conferred under the Associations Incorporations Act; we think that would address most of the issues there. There are issues to do with residents' meetings, which I will not go through.

In recommendation 10, we took some evidence from one of the villages about the CPI. A lot of the residents complained about the cost of retirement villages' charges going up at a rate greater than CPI. It was put to us that the bundle of charges which related to retirement villages were different from the normal community-based CPI and can, given that a lot of the charge related to electricity and water costs, go up at a faster rate.

We thought it was reasonable that there should be a particular retirement village CPI created and struck each year which could form the basis of negotiations at each of the villages, and the villages and representatives of people who live in the villages, with some help from Treasury, could perhaps get together and work out what that should be. If the charge was above that, then there would be a process of appeal.

We talked about in recommendation 12 greater transparency in relation to management fees. There was a fair bit of evidence about concern about that. Financial management generally came up in recommendation 14, and we recommend that the act be amended to prescribe that, when a surplus occurs within a village's recurrent charges, the charges must be used for the purpose for which they were incurred under the resident's agreement. We then have recommendations about what should happen when a deficit occurs.

Recommendation number 7 deals with council rates. There was evidence about how councils rated properties and the notion of double-dipping, and we made some recommendation about that. The next section deals with dispute resolution, and recommendations 18 through to 23 deal with how disputes should better be resolved. I will not go through the detail of that, other than to say it is to give the Residential Tenancies Tribunal stronger and clearer powers, and to suggest to the government that some sort of advocacy arrangement be established to speak on behalf of often older and perhaps vulnerable residents. We also recognise that it would be sensible to have group applications to the tribunal. At the moment only individuals can do it.

Chapter C, the third chapter, is about leaving a retirement village. I think a lot of the issues about leaving, and the costs associated with leaving, will be addressed by the first section, at the beginning—

Mrs Redmond interjecting:

The Hon. J.D. HILL: —as the member for Heysen says. However, there are some issues about leaving, particularly about how long a person can stay there and at what point they need to vacate, when they get their money and the like, as well as the connection with aged care facilities and so on. I will not go through the detail of that, but I think they are quite sensible arrangements as well.

There were some other matters, including changes to the objects of the act, which I think are pretty sensible, and investigation and compliance. We are recommending there that the government investigate amendments to the powers of investigation and compliance under the act, similar to those contained in New South Wales legislation. We recommend that penalty amounts under the act are reviewed and significantly increased, that expiable offences are significantly increased for minor offences, and that the RTT can request that a matter be investigated.

We have a recommendation about financial difficulty and mismanagement, and then the final three recommendations about interaction with other legislation, including recommendation 33 that fact sheets be developed to make sure that residents and prospective residents are aware of all fair trading practice protections available to them, including the Australian consumer law.

That was a quick run through of the recommendations. I think this was really good, solid work. One of the first things I was involved in here when I became a member 16 years ago was a select committee that looked into the River Murray. That was a multiparty select committee, and we came up with unanimous recommendations, and if they had been followed 15 years ago there would not have been problems with the River Murray.

I have to say that various things and contests happen in this place, but in my experience, at least, the work done by select committees is very positive. The more of these kinds of approaches to dealing with complex problems that we can implement the better we will all be as a community. I think you get to the truth of the matter; you get the politics out of it and you get good, logical, consensual thinking applied.

So I do commend this to the house. In conclusion I would like to thank those who helped us through this process, including Paul Collett, the Serjeant-at-Arms, and Shannon Riggs, his assistant, as well as our committee adviser Cathy Pedler, who is a senior retirement villages officer at the Office of the Ageing.

I am not sure how all this works now. It has been tabled and noted and others will speak, and it then has to lie on the table until the government responds in a particular period of time. As we are not sure about how all that works, I will say to whoever is in government or whoever is in this parliament, 'Don't let this thing lapse. Make sure it gets back on the table in due course.'

Hopefully, whoever is the minister of the day will address these issues and change the law to give better protection to individuals but also to those who provide services to those individuals, because we do want this industry to flourish. It is needed by our community, but it will need to adapt and change. I think the recommendations we have made here will not hinder the flexibility and adaptability that is required but will provide better guarantees and protections for all sides of this industry.

Mrs REDMOND (Heysen) (17:28): It is my pleasure to rise to speak briefly on the report of this select committee, chaired of course by the member for Kaurna. As he has already indicated it is a committee that reached unanimous conclusions on the recommendations. I know that the time allotted to me will not allow me to go through the recommendations in any more detail than he has done, but at the outset I will say that I think it is a comprehensive report and that, like member for Kaurna, I am hopeful that a new government will look at this report—albeit that it is only being tabled and briefly discussed now.

Before I came into this place—indeed since I was about 12 years old—I have had an ongoing interest in matters of ageing. I started visiting nursing homes at about the age of 12 and realised that there was a lot to be improved. This happens to be the third occasion in the 12 years I have been in this place that this particular piece of legislation, the Retirement Villages Act 1987, has been looked at in some detail, and I have been involved in that on each occasion.

That came about not just because I had this long-standing interest in matters to do with ageing, but because in my legal practice prior to coming in here, I had had probably more contact with this legislation than most other lawyers around the state and almost certainly more than any other member of this place. This is because there was a particular retirement village in Stirling—not Pinoak Tiers, which was behind the hospital and managed by the hospital (I was on the board of the hospital and that never had a complaint)—but there was one, Sevenoaks Retirement Village. In a period of six months prior to me coming in here, statewide there were only 19 complaints about retirement villages and 12 of those came from that village. So, I had become very familiar with the terms of the legislation and its problems.

The member for Kaurna already mentioned the ageing of our population, and I often talk to people about the fact that we do not actually realise until we start to contemplate the numbers, but at the moment people are always surprised when they hear that there are some 3,500 people around this nation over the age of 100. People think, 'Gee, that's a lot! The Queen has signed a lot of letters to people—3,500,' but that pales into insignificance when you think that, as the baby boomer generation comes through, that bubble will expand and there will be, on best estimates, around about 78,000 people over the age of 100 at the year 2055.

Clearly, when this legislation was brought in in 1987, 25 years ago, the retirement village industry was a very different thing, and indeed most of the retirement villages in those days were run by charitable institutions. In fact, the one that the hospital ran in Stirling, known as Pinoak Tiers, was originally constructed by the Rotary club to which I belonged. So, there were all sorts of little church groups, local community groups, hospitals, all sorts of people, who had constructed these retirement villages that provided cheap accommodation, and they were quite adequate for their day.

The difficulty, I think, in part that we have had over the years (and as I say, this is third tranche of amendments and recommendations that I have been involved in in the last 12 years just on this act) arises because we have shifted from a predominance of what I will call community-based retirement villages to retirement villages that are run as a money-making profitable enterprise. There is nothing wrong with that—I am not in any way criticising that—it is just that we need to recognise that there are these two separate sorts: the ones that are run by not-for-profit organisations who are not trying to make money, and the increasingly common and more expensive ones, run by organisations that are trying to make a profit from the running of it.

I think that is actually at the heart of where we begin to have the problems and, as the member for Kaurna mentioned, what we did was divide this report into basically four sections. The first was this issue of what people need to know before they go into a village, then the issue of what happens once you are living in a village, then what happens when you leave the village, and then, lastly, the miscellaneous odds and sods that did not fit under any of those headings.

The key to it all, I think, is making sure that, when people are contemplating going into a retirement village, they know exactly what it is they are purchasing, and it is not a house or a unit. They are simply purchasing a right to live there, depending on what other benefits they have. I was just talking to the member for Goyder a moment ago and he was talking about a village he visited up near Gawler in the last few days. He said it was a particularly well-run village, and most of them are, to be fair.

Although the committee heard lots and lots of complaints and concerns, when you think of the overall number who live in retirement villages and the overall number of villages in the state, the number of difficulties is a relatively small number, but they are significant. Particularly, people in that latter stage of life, who have often never had any legal complications in their life, suddenly find that they have a problem because they did not understand when they went into the village what it was they were buying into.

They thought they were buying a unit and that they would have, therefore, certain proprietorial rights, and rather than that they have then subsequently discovered all sorts of things, as to whether they are responsible for upkeep of certain things, whether they are going to have to pay into a sinking fund because at some stage when they move someone else will come in, and over the whole life of the unit the costs have to be apportioned for keeping the unit up to scratch. There were all sorts of issues that arose and, as the member for Kaurna mentioned, we would overcome most of those if we managed to make sure that people going into a unit actually understood, when they were going into a retirement village, the nature of what they were purchasing.

I have visited retirement villages not only all over this state but, indeed, other states. The best one I ever saw was in Hawaii when I went to a conference there on my way home. I had been studying ageing at the Catholic University of America in Washington DC. On the way home, I lectured to both an undergraduate class and subsequently to a graduate class about ageing in Australia, at the medical school at the University of Hawaii. I attended a carer's conference that happened to be on in Hawaii, but then I also visited this wonderful retirement village.

If anyone is interested they can still look up on the web, I think, the report that I did back in 2003 about that. You will see that it was like a five-star resort but, interestingly, it was run something like a time share, so that you lived in it but you never owned it. You paid a monthly rental fee, which is much more common in America. If you wanted to, for instance, visit your children over on the mainland you could simply go to stay at the nearest one. There were some 340 of these things all around America and you could book yourself in for a week at the nearest one to where your kids happened to live.

Now, it was about $5,000 a month, and this was 12 years ago, so it was not a cheap place to live, but it supplied everything. The only thing you were up for was your own telephone costs and any of your own personal costs. Your meals were provided in a restaurant type setting. Waitresses served your meals. There was a changeable menu every day. It was very good. It involved everything from supported accommodation through to retirement living and it certainly was the best I have ever seen.

I would have to say that I got the impression, after listening to a lot of the issues arising in this particular select committee, and I would be reasonably confident that none of the members of the select committee were planning to move into a retirement village, having heard all of the detail of the difficulties that have arisen for various people in this particular area.

The member for Kaurna also mentioned the fact that we are not going to be requiring that people must be retired to live in a retirement village. We tossed around whether we should have a different name for it but we could not come up with a better name, although sometimes you might think lifestyle village might be better. My own expectation in relation to this is that what will happen is we will need to change the nature of what people are getting.

I believe that as the baby boomer generation, that massive number of people, comes through and the first of them reach retirement age at 65—even though we are not going to have retirement ages any more, but if we call 65 retirement age the first of the baby boomers have just started retiring—there will be a huge increase in the number of people getting into that age group. As they come through my belief is that they are not going to want to give up the independence that comes from owning their own property, be that a unit, apartment or freestanding house, and exchange that for living in a retirement village where a lot of things are controlled. That is where the essence of this report is going to be important.

We need to accommodate the fact that there will be this changing demographic, there will be a changing marketplace and the market, we believe, has to be left to respond to those changes. There are only, I think, a very limited number of places in the state at the moment which call themselves retirement villages, but which you can actually purchase in the same way as you could purchase a community title or a strata title unit. I think that is going to be increasingly what we will see people wanting to have.

A lot of people have gone into retirement villages. For those who are not familiar with the system, when you purchase the licence to occupy, generally after the first year there will be some sort of retention, maybe 4 or 5 per cent of the amount that that unit has been purchased for or maybe the amount it is going to be sold for in due course. The next year it will be another 4 or 5 per cent, up to a maximum of about 20 or 25 per cent.

The effect of it has been that if you go into a unit, and particularly over the last few years, if you bought a unit just before the global financial crash, you could find very easily that having paid several hundred thousand dollars for the right to occupy a unit in a nice new retirement village and if you then decided to leave having lost the various years of retention (say it was 20 per cent), if the value of the place had actually remained static or gone down, on top of that you then may have to pay into a sort of sinking fund for maintenance and all those sorts of things.

Then there are also remarketing fees, and remarketing is another area of particular contention with a number of people. People could find that they really did not have anywhere near the amount of money returned to them that they were expecting to get returned upon departure from the retirement village. Indeed, there are people who have said that they could not afford to leave the village because they would not get back enough money from the investment they thought they had made. It is not an investment: it is a payment for a lifestyle. Now, provided people know that what they are purchasing is the lifestyle, they are purchasing getting rid of the burden of having the upkeep of a house, of having the maintenance of sometimes an older house.

They are paying for the fact that they have a new place, they are paying for the fact that it might have bowling greens, swimming pools, it might have golf courses, it might have all sorts of facilities and they might like living in an environment where they have less garden to look after, they might like living in an environment where there are not too many young people running around making a lot of noise. There could be all sorts of things that motivate them to go into a village and, as long as they understand that they are paying to have that lifestyle and they are not paying to own the property, that will be the key to the satisfaction of most of the recommendations in this report.

One other thing I want to touch on briefly in relation to the report, and I do not think we reached a firm conclusion about it, is one of the problems that was highlighted by the evidence given to the committee by residents. Most of the people giving evidence on behalf of owners of villages were relatively supportive of the good management of the villages and there was no need to change the current legislation, but those who currently reside in villages made a number of complaints. One of them I thought had some legitimacy, and that is in relation to the basis upon which they have to pay their rates.

Of course, the owner of the village has to pay rates on the overall property but then each individual housing unit within the village pays rates to the local council and those rates are basically based on a valuation as though it was an owned property. These people are getting damned if they do and damned if they don't. They are not getting the benefit of ownership of the property but they are getting the downside of ownership of the property because they have to pay rates as though they own the property, so I think there is actually room for councils and maybe the Valuer-General to reconsider how all of that is going to be managed.

The final thing I want to talk about just briefly is about these smaller community based not-for-profit retirement villages. There is no way of telling this but my suspicion is that what we may end up with is those becoming more like rental accommodation for people who perhaps cannot afford to own a house before they go into a village, and therefore it might be a mechanism for providing security of accommodation for those people as they go through their later years.

The member for Kaurna mentioned that, while the age limit in the act is only 55, very rarely do you see anyone anywhere near that age. Indeed, I think just about everyone on the committee was above that age and none of us was contemplating going into a village in the near future. The average age in most villages is well up into the seventies and eighties and beyond, but if you are in a situation where up to that point you have not been able to afford a house, then perhaps some of those smaller community based retirement villages may in the future want to consider becoming simply affordable accommodation for people who have not otherwise been able to afford to go into their own home.

From my studies in ageing over the years, it is absolutely clear that those with the best chance of success in retirement are those who have security in their housing. So, home ownership is a massive benefit for anyone going into retirement, but security of housing is the single most important factor in terms of how people manage their retirement. As I said, that is going to be an increasingly long period of time.

I will finish on the note that I often say to people when I am out talking about our ageing community. I have already mentioned the number of people over the age of 100 that we are expecting to have by the year 2055—78,000 in Australia. If South Australia has even 10 per cent of that, that is nearly 8,000 people in this state over the age of 100. My advice to all those intending to be over 100—and I certainly intend to live that long—is that it is your grandchildren who you need to be really kind to, because your grandchildren are going to be in their 50s when you are in your 100-something year.

Those grandchildren who are in their 50s are going to have children who just will not leave home, because they cannot afford to, life is too good at home or they have not finished studying or whatever. They already do not go out and become independent until about the age of 25. So, they will have children who will not leave home, and they will have elderly parents in the 75 to 80-year age group.

Those elderly parents are the children of the baby boomer generation and, because we have been silly enough to overindulge them in the way we have, they are going to be the first generation in recorded history not to live longer than their parents. So, these poor grandchildren are going to have sickly elderly parents and still kicking on very elderly grandparents, as well as kids at home. So, for heaven's sake, be nice to your grandchildren if you are a baby boomer.

Mr SIBBONS (Mitchell) (17:47): I rise today to speak in support of the report tabled by the Select Committee on the Review of the Retirement Villages Act 1987 and the recommendations within it. The committee sought to investigate the rights and obligations of residents and administering authorities of registered retirement villages, contractual disclosure, financial obligations, compliance and regulation, and dispute resolution within the sector. The committee proceeded to hear evidence from a variety of stakeholders and organisations, including retirement village residents, the Property Council of Australia, the South Australian Retirement Villages Residents Association and commercial and not-for-profit village operators.

I would particularly like to thank Mr Brian Mowbray from the South Australian Retirement Villages Residents Association, a constituent of Mitchell, for raising this issue with the member for Ashford and myself. Brian has been a passionate advocate for retirement village residents in South Australia and has an excellent understanding of contracts used in this sector, and I sincerely thank him for his contribution to the committee. I also thank the minister for meeting with Brian, the member for Ashford and myself to understand the concerns of the sector and agreeing that there needed to be a review to address those concerns.

It is clear from the evidence provided to the committee that there are a number of benefits to living in retirement villages. Most residents enjoy the companionship and the security and safety that goes with village living. However, there is considerable concern about the perceived lack of clarity about contractual and some administrative matters. Village operators, while supportive of greater transparency and clearer contractual information being provided, were opposed to measures which might restrict their flexibility or impact their running costs.

The committee attempted to balance these interests, seeking commonsense recommendations which will have practical benefits for consumers without unduly burdening the operators. Some of the recommendations include:

proper disclosure to a prospective resident of their rights and obligations on moving into a village;

amending the act to provide standard definitions of exit fees;

requiring a disclosure document is to be provided to a resident prior to moving into a village, which discloses all fees and charges for which a resident is responsible, including exit fees and any remarketing costs and conditions, and that any not included in the document are not able to be charged;

amending the act to provide greater transparency in relation to management fees or head office costs charged to the village;

providing a mechanism for the resolution of disputes;

criteria needs to be developed for the valuation of retirement village properties which accurately reflect the purchase of a licence to occupy under a retirement village scheme;

enabling residents to appoint an independent valuer on vacating the village if a valuation amount is not agreed between the parties;

investigating the establishment of a register for retirement village licences;

amending the act to require that those RTT members hearing retirement village matters must be legal practitioners of at least five years standing and should have a sound understanding of the act and previous decisions; and

that a code of conduct is extended to encompass behaviour policies which protect operators and residents from harassment and intimidation and that promote a safe and secure environment.

There are 34 recommendations in total, all of which are aimed at ensuring improved consumer rights for residents of retirement villages. Clearer and more transparent contracts should ensure conditions and costs are easily understood upfront, and improved dispute resolution should see significant improvements for the increasing number of retirees choosing to take up a retirement village lifestyle. I commend this report to the house and look forward to seeing the implementation of these recommendations in due course.

The Hon. S.W. KEY (Ashford) (17:51): I just wanted to contribute to this debate by congratulating the select committee for their recommendations on the findings and also the way in which, under the chair of the member for Kaurna, they conducted this review. I want to thank them very much for that. Part of the reason for me wanting to speak on this debate is that over the years of being a member of parliament I have had a number of constituents come to me with concerns that they have had with living in a retirement village.

There have been some positive comments as well, but overall I think the points that have been made most ably by the member for Mitchell and also the member for Kaurna really do emphasise some of the concerns that I have had raised with me over the years, particularly consumer precontract disclosure and the need for information.

I would argue for that very strongly. There was a movement some years ago about having legislation in plain English so that we could understand all different parts of legislation and acts of parliament. I certainly support and endorse the view that contracts for retirement villages need to be a lot clearer and easier to understand. People do need to know about what fees and charges are going to be extended to them at different times of being in that retirement village lifestyle area.

The exit fees scenarios are the ones that constituents particularly come to Ashford to talk about. It may have been that their parent or parents have either died or have to go into other accommodation, and because quite often the children of people who are living in retirement villages were not party to precontract information or, in fact, the contract, they find that there is a whole lot of exit fees and responsibilities that they were not aware of, that their parents or relatives had negotiated.

I am really pleased to hear that there are some suggestions about trying to make the whole approach to retirement villages easier to understand. The frequently asked questions are really important. The web-based calculator that was mentioned I think will be a really helpful tool for not only the people living in retirement villages but also carers, relatives and friends that need to take up the responsibility from time to time in that area.

I have also received a number of complaints over the years with regard to the provision and the payment for electricity and water, and, more recently, internet charges, and I think that that is something that does need to be clarified. Ongoing management fees seem to be an issue throughout the community, but certainly, as the member for Kaurna reported, the cost of retirement village charges and CPI and what that actually means in a retirement village context is something that I think does need to be followed up.

Because, as I said, usually people come to see me about concerns they have as residents or people exiting retirement villages, the whole issue of dispute resolution seems to me to be particularly important, and I am glad that there are recommendations that talk about the fact that there can be group applications, and also suggestions that there needs to be support for advocacy and recognition of very good retirement village groups, as well as the South Australian Retirement Village Residents Association.

Like the member for Mitchell, I was really impressed, but not surprised, that Brian Mowbray from the South Australian Retirement Village Residents Association came to see me. It did take me back, as I am sure it did the member for Mitchell, to dealing with Brian Mowbray as the assistant secretary of what was then called the Metal Workers Union. He conducted his business in a totally professional way. He is certainly no shrinking violet with regard to agreements and legal matters, and he conducted the meetings with the member for Mitchell and me in almost the same manner you would have expected if you had been at Trades Hall.

Similarly, when we went to meet with the Minister for Health and Ageing, he conducted that meeting. The Minister for Ageing respectfully chaired that meeting, but certainly Brian Mowbray was in control of what we discussed. He was not quite as assertive with the member for Kaurna when he was the minister, but I think he had probably known the member for Kaurna in other work that he had done and felt a little more relaxed with the same log of claims, as he called it, that he put forward to both of those ministers. For me it was a pleasure to see.

Like the member for Heysen, I have had an interest in this area for quite some time and have actually done some work in the aged care area, and I need to mention that the shop steward, as I called her, for the retirement villages that I first met was Joan Stone. She was certainly a very fierce person who advocated for rights in a whole lot of areas for people who were considered to be seniors or in the older category.

I am really pleased that this has happened and I know that a number of constituents who live in retirement villages in the seat of Ashford will welcome these recommendations and probably lobby fairly hard that the minister, whoever they may be, actually put them into practice.

Motion carried.


At 17:58 the house adjourned until Thursday 28 November 2013 at 10:30.


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