Graham Perrett (Moreton, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

The word 'crony' in the dictionary says 'a close friend or companion'. If you're saying that you're not the Prime Minister's close friend or companion, I'm happy to take that interjection. Come in spinner.

This Prime Minister and his cronies have created this aged-care crisis. They have ignored this aged-care crisis, and the 2018 budget failed to fix this aged-care crisis. Yet, like fake news on steroids, they have pretended to actually do something. Duplicity and ignoring that there is a crisis will not make this crisis go away. Using smoke and mirrors to pretend to announce extra funding for aged care will not change the bottom line, which is that there is no extra money allocated for the growing cohort of older Australians needing care. A budget announcement of 14,000 extra home care packages is laughable, as the waiting list nationally for home care packages grew by 20,000 in the last six months of 2017, as my good friend the member for Franklin would know.

However, suddenly we don’t get up-to-date figures, because the Minister for Aged Care has not released the data for the first quarter of this year. That quarter ended in March, almost three months ago. We know the department has previously committed to releasing the data two months after the end of that quarter. The release of the data is now a month late. What is the minister hiding? The last data that was released, now six months old, revealed almost 105,000 older Australians were waiting for a home care package, with the average wait time for a high-level package blowing out to more than a year. As I saw in Eight Mile Plains—I was having a barbecue on the weekend—this causes heartache inside families. It's just a piece of data for those opposite; it's a heart-aching story for the real Australians who are actually trying to get their family into some sort of caring environment.

Sadly, we know that older Australians don't have time. They don't have the years to wait to get the care that they need now. Sadly, we have a government that can find $80 billion for tax cuts for big business, including $17 billion to get to the big banks—which were not struggling the last time I looked—but they can't get one extra cent to give to older Australians.

We know the Prime Minister has no idea how important the work of caring for our elderly is. We saw that in question time last week, with his cruel and insensitive advice to those who care for our aged was that they 'should aspire to get a better job'. I think the advice was to someone in Braddon. How incredible. The Prime Minister needs to spend some time in one of our world-class aged-care facilities—not just one of those selfie flash-mob fleeting visits—actually sitting down and talking to people who provide aged care. Then he might have an understand of how difficult this crisis is. (Time expired)

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