Tony Windsor (New England, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

It is very pleasing to see an active sign come from the minister. I am not afraid to say the words. In many senses, there has been good economic management, and there has been a resources boom. The minister has woken me up now. There have been a whole range of activities out there, but it is not all about good management; it is also about the secure nation that we have had for many generations that has developed an environment where investment and a whole range of other things can take place. Those older people that I was talking about are part and parcel of that creation. If we do have a set of circumstances where there are good times, then our older people should be included in the equation.

The other issue I will raise briefly is Meals on Wheels. I congratulate the Prime Minister once again on the $1.5 billion announcement of last week. He recognised that a lot of people are staying in their homes longer and that, when they do go into aged-care facilities, the degree of care is much higher—even though it might be for a shorter period—and hence so is the cost of those people going into care. Meals on Wheels is a very important ingredient for some of those people staying in their homes, not only because of the food but also, in my view, because of the spirit of the volunteers. That is probably just as important as the food.

Within Tamworth, for instance, the president of Meals on Wheels, Laurie Beattie, and his committee have been working very hard to establish a new kitchen. I am pleased to say that Deputy Prime Minister Mark Vaile announced some funding for that in recent weeks, but there is a shortfall and I hope that the government would look favourably at any further application, as I hope the state government would as well. I raise the Meals on Wheels issue because I think it is a very important part of what the Prime Minister addressed in his announcement the other day about how older people will be staying in their homes longer. We are encouraging them to do that and obviously nourishment is a very important part of enabling them to do that. So Meals on Wheels is a critical ingredient in many of our towns.

The last thing that I would like to mention is in some way a criticism. I have raised on a number of occasions in this House the need to look after our older veterans, particularly those who served in the Second World War but did not have what is called ‘qualifying service’. They did not have an angry shot fired at them. The treatment that has been meted out to these people is quite different to that meted out to someone who served overseas where there were angry shots fired and who had ‘qualifying service’. I have argued a number of times in the parliament—and others have as well—that the gold card be extended to those people.

That group of people is dying at the rate of 800 a month. I think it is time that we recognised those veterans. The other day the Minister for Defence talked about encouraging people into the defence forces. We are putting in place a ‘try before you buy’ type of program and a whole range of encouragements. Young people enlist in our defence forces, but we have this very distressing and awful arrangement at the end of some veterans’ lives where they are being treated differently because, even though they may have given up five years of their life to be trained to defend the nation, they have participated in the war in Australia rather than under gunfire or by having bombs dropped on them.

I would like to recognise, very briefly, a man who absolutely fought for this issue, a man called Ken Coulton, who recently passed away in his 90s. Ken fought to be recognised. He was an extraordinary man, but he had in a sense a guilt complex that he had been treated differently to others. He spent five years willing to defend the nation. My father was in the Middle East. If the Japanese had kept coming, my father in the Middle East would have been useless in defending people on Australian shores. The people who did not leave our shores were the ones who would have been here to defend us, and I think they should be recognised in the same way that other veterans who did serve overseas are currently recognised.

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