Russell Broadbent (McMillan, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I am disappointed that the memory of the shadow minister—who was not here at the time—does not go back to the shambles left in aged care by the previous Labor government, as seen by me on one of my visits to this House between 1990 and 1993. If you want to talk about the blame game, Carolyn Hogg was in Victoria—this is from my Victorian experience—and Peter Staples was up here as Minister for Housing and Aged Care and they could not agree on anything. All over the place they had nursing homes without funded beds. It was a complete shambles. Who had to come in and fix it? The Howard government came in and said, ‘We will deal with aged care.’ At that time, about $2 billion was being spent by the previous Labor government; now we are up to about $6½ billion being spent by the Howard government. However, what this legislation is about is this.

See this speech in context