Julian Hill (Bruce, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

This is an important motion, and I congratulate the member for Hindmarsh on moving it. Already what we've seen that it's having an impact because previously there were no government speakers listed at all. The minister just happened to be sitting around doing some paperwork and went: 'Oh, my God! It's my portfolio. I might start talking.' Now the government have sent backbenchers in to read out random dot points and press releases.

I was going to take a point of order on relevance, because most of what the previous speaker talked about was not to do with home care; it was about hospital funding and the PBS and whatever other random pages she'd had shoved into her hand to come here and read to the House. But let's make an important point: I didn't take a point of order, because I think she is digging a hole for the government here. The point of properly funding home care is that it saves money, because people can stay in their own home instead of having to spend more on hospitals. That is an important point.

This is a growing crisis, by anyone's measure. There are more than 100,000 senior Australians right now sitting at home without proper care. This includes 60,000 people with absolutely nothing—no care whatsoever. Forty-thousand people are on a lower level of care than they actually need and 80,000 people need high-needs care, including people with severe dementia. It's important to remember that these are people—human beings—not just numbers. We often bandy around statistics—we need that many billion and there are this many thousand people—but these are human beings: senior Australians who have served our country, worked for decades, built the country and paid taxes, in most cases, and they deserve decent treatment.

This is especially important in my electorate. My electorate has a much older demographic than the surrounding areas in south-east Melbourne, with over 35,000 people aged 60 and over. There is the despair and pain, as the member for Franklin said, of people calling our offices, usually sons and daughters, saying, 'Please, can you do something to help my aged parents, who are living in despair at home without proper care and with no timeline as to when this will be fixed.'

The government should not see this as a surprise. It's been raised before by the shadow minister, by local governments across the country, by aged-care peak bodies and by many Labor MPs. But we've had zero action from the minister. In fact, it's worse than zero action. Despite the minister's polite waffle—he told us it's complex—it's actually not that complex: find the funding and you clear the backlog. He admitted that when he was asked only a few months ago, 'Why is this backlog there?' He said, 'There are budgetary and fiscal pressures.' So, that is the truth of it. He's already said what the problem is: the government have not prioritised funding for senior Australians. That is the fact of it.

They have prioritised, as the member for Franklin aptly said, a tax cut—a $65 billion tax cut for big business. The other thing they prioritised in their budget was a tax cut for everyone in this chamber. The top two per cent of Australians, those earning over $180,000, got a tax cut from this mob in the budget. They got a tax cut—

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