Kevin Hogan (Page, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to talk about this issue with great joy because there's been an unparalleled investment in my community not just within home care places but also within the wider aged-care area. I'll start with home care packages. In the last four years, home care packages have gone up by over 30 per cent in my community. So there are 30 per cent more home care packages in my community now than there were when we came to government in 2013, which is a huge investment in that sector. As the minister was saying earlier, we certainly understand that people do want to stay home for longer, and having more of these packages, and more wrapped around these packages, means that the flexibility, with people being able to stay at home longer, is there. That's why, in my community, we have increased the number of packages available in this area by 30 per cent.

But there's more in the wider sector. Within the residential care sector and others in my community, there's been an enormous boon, not only in the availability of home care and residential care packages, which include dementia packages, but in jobs. I will run through a few of them. In the Clarence Valley there have been three major upgrades of aged-care places, both residential and home care. The Whiddon Group opened their upgraded facility in Grafton just a few months ago, and I had the pleasure of being there to open that. We've got a new aged-care provider coming into our region in the Clarence Valley, called Signature Care, and they themselves, with both residential and home care packages, are going to make an investment of tens of millions of dollar in that community. The Dougherty aged care facility is upgrading and is also going to be offering more aged-care places. The combination of residential and home care packages will not only provide hundreds of extra places; there will also be hundreds of extra jobs.

There have also been more home care places provided in Kyogle. With the wider residential facility, we are not only providing some funding for places in aged care in Kyogle; we're actually helping one particular provider build the physical building itself. We understand that people don't only want extra home care packages. Obviously when you have a community that is widespread—it's not all in one centre—people also want residential aged-care packages in their own community, and we are making sure that we provide extra places in a variety of different communities. We also offered more home care packages in Casino as well. There are also some expansions of residential aged-care facilities happening there.

I'll just go through some of the bigger figures as well. I know the minister mentioned some of them, but I think some of them are important to reiterate. We announced 6,000 additional level 3 and level 4 home care packages over 2017 and 2018. As I said, I certainly got a high proportion of those. In the 2017 budget we provided an investment of $5.5 billion to extend the Commonwealth Home Support Program. Again, this is a massive investment. It funds a range of essential services—Meals on Wheels, community transport, personal care, nursing and allied health, domestic assistance, home maintenance and modifications and a range of respite services. Again, I am exceptionally happy about these figures of what I've got for my community, in both home care and residential care. These figures, country wide, show the massive investment that we are making in this obviously growing sector.

Obviously we're doing this because it's a statistical fact that we, as a community, are getting older and people are living longer, so the resources that we have to put into it will always increase. In a wider sense, we have a record $18.6 billion of aged-care investment in 2017-18, the year we're currently in, which is the first part of a nearly $100 billion planned for the next five years. We are a government committed to aged-care providers.

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