A Bendigo initiative to provide accommodation for aged care staff has highlighted the plight of low paid workers around the country.
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Aged care provider Benetas has created its own short-term accommodation by renovating some former independent living units in a facility next to its Eaglehawk aged care home.
Benetas chief executive Sandra Hills told the Advertiser Bendigo had been "the most difficult region" for staff housing, which was needed for both short and long-term workers.
With the first two units continually full since they were completed two or three years ago, the organisation created another two, which were just recently completed, giving it four short-term, motel-style accommodation units in total.
The Benetas initiative has been featured in an Anglicare Australia report produced for the multi-organisational Everybody's Home housing campaign.
The report, titled Priced Out - An Index of Affordable Rentals for Australia's Essential Workers, highlights links between the housing crisis and workforce shortages, finding that "essential workers are being priced out of their own communities".
"This helps explain why so many essential industries are facing workforce shortages," the report states.
The report found the problem for employers has in some cases prompted unconventional responses, including in Bendigo, where Benetas had been creating its own staff accommodation.
From around 2021 the organisation had employed a "multi-pronged approach" to the problem, according to the Benetas CEO.
One strategy was to give employees letters to show local real estate agencies and to engage with agents about the importance of their work.
"What we were trying to do is say, 'Look, these are key people in your community and they can't look after older people if they have nowhere to stay'," Ms Hills said.
While the agents had all been very open to the idea of prioritising aged care staff, there was no evidence the strategy had made any difference, Ms Hills said.
More effective was Benetas' scheme to create its own short-term accommodation.
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Ms Hills said the scheme was needed because "staff are at the centre of everything".
"Staff need somewhere comfortable to live that's not too far away and they need a decent wage," she said, noting that workers in the sector would benefit from a 15 per cent wage rise from the end of June this year.
The Fair Work Commission has extended a 15 per cent pay rise for aged care workers that initially only covered direct care workers in residential aged care and in-home care, to senior kitchen staff and lifestyle coordinators, and has recommended a date the change should take effect.
The newly released Priced Out report compares after-tax award wages in 15 essential services jobs with rental prices for units in different areas of the country.
It found that "virtually no region in Australia is affordable for our aged care workers, early childhood carers, cleaners, nurses and many other essential workers we rely on".
Across Victoria, there were no affordable regions for the workers profiled. Even in Gippsland, the state's most affordable region, rents were so high that "every worker we profiled would be left in rental stress," the author, Maiy Azize, said.
"So many essential industries are facing workforce shortages with workers unable to afford to stay or move to parts of the country where these shortages are at their worst."
The report calls for the federal government to reduce negative gearing and capital gains tax exemptions and build 25,000 new social housing dwellings a year.
The federal government's plan to finance the construction of 30,000 social and affordable rental homes over five years through the creation of a $10 billion Housing Australia Future Fund has so far failed to pass parliament.
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