Peter Dutton (Dickson, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Health and Ageing) Share this | Hansard source

For a long time, Madam Speaker, this minister has fooled the industry, but I find as I move around the country talking to providers that they are now starting to see through all of the smoke and mirrors. They are now starting to see this bill for what it is. It is not about a reform of the aged-care sector. If they were serious about doing that they would have done it five or six years ago. They would have applied at least one dollar of the billions of dollars they wasted to the aged-care sector to help build infrastructure and to make it more affordable for people on low incomes to go into aged care, but they sought to do none of that. They pushed it off to the Productivity Commission to try to get through the last election. Then, when they had the Productivity Commission recommendations, they sat on them and pushed them aside because they had run out of money. That is what happened with this government's approach to aged care. Then they tried to pretend that they had some $3.7 billion huge investment, but when you strip it down it is a net extra spend of $250 million over that four-year period and a shameful exercise in deception by this government and by this minister. They need to be called for it.

So what have we done? We have tried to engage constructively with the sector to work out how this bad bill could be improved. What could be changed to improve the situation for aged care in this country? How could we make it easier for people to find their way through the mess of aged care and find a place for that grandmother, grandfather, mother, father or loved one? That is what we sought to do through the Senate inquiry process, and yet what does this minister do? This minister says, 'We are going to ignore that Senate inquiry process, we are not going to listen to the recommendations of the sector, we are not going to listen to people of good will who sought to make this bill better; we just want to deliver for the HSU.' That is really the only objective that the government seeks in this bill. They want to make sure that they repay a dividend to their union bosses, and that really sums up what this whole sad, six-year period in our country's history is about.

This is what it amounts to. The puppeteers have pulled the strings for the last six years, and we have seen it play out through leadership changes which have impacted on the government's desire in this area. This is the point. This government has been distracted by its own leadership deliberations, by the knifing of Kevin Rudd and by the proposed resurrection of Kevin Rudd—not to be. This government, whilst it has been distracted by that, has not concentrated on aged care or the millions of Australians in the future who will seek aged-care services for their loved ones. The government brings this bill in at the eleventh hour of this dying government because they seek to repay a dividend to those union bosses who supported their entry into this place. Craig Thomson—

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