Christopher Pyne (Sturt, Liberal Party, Minister for Ageing) Share this | Hansard source

Right, then why don’t you wait for it? There are 208,000 operational beds in Australia—operational places. When we came to office, the ratio of beds for each group of 1,000 people aged 70 and over was 93 under the previous government. By 2010, the ratio will be 113. That will be made up of 44 high-care beds, 44 low-care beds and 25 Community Aged Care Packages.

I note that the Labor Party has this obsession with ignoring Community Aged Care Packages and pretending that they are not aged-care places. Of course, I can understand why they do that. When they were in government there were only 4½ thousand community aged-care places. Now, by 2010, there will be 45,000 community aged-care places. We have increased the number tenfold. So I can understand why Labor is embarrassed about community aged-care places and therefore tries to pretend that they are not an alternative to aged care.

People vastly prefer to stay in their own homes and age in their own homes if they have that option available to them. That is why we have doubled the funding for home and community care places across Australia and why we have increased the number of community aged-care packages tenfold in the last 11 years. It gives people the opportunity to stay in their own homes for a much longer period of time, and it is obviously an important part of the government’s response to the ageing process. It does not surprise me that Labor is embarrassed about that, because we will have increased the spending on aged care since 1996 from a paltry $3.1 billion to $10.1 billion by 2010. Quite frankly, the government’s record on aged care should be embarrassing to the Labor Party.

We have increased the number of community care packages, which the member for Boothby asked me about, from 4,500 to 45,000. There are now 25 per 1,000 people aged 70 or over. The Prime Minister has a particular affection for respite care, and we ensure that respite is a significant part of any program that involves carers and others. When Labor was in power we were spending $18 million on respite care in 1996. By 2010 we will be spending $190 million on respite care. (Time expired)

Proposed expenditure agreed to.

Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade

Proposed expenditure, $4,180,814,000.

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