Daniel Mulino (Fraser, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I commend the shadow minister for raising this motion here today. I believe this is one of the most important issues that this parliament and the parliaments following it will face. I also commend the speeches made by others on this side, which I think have highlighted the abject failure for the last seven years on the part of this government. I would particularly highlight the speech by the member for Dobell. There are a lot of statistics in this space, but it's critical to remember that, behind each of these statistics, there are real people. I think her speech highlighted in a very compelling way what it means for real people when a government fails to deliver services, as this government currently is.

I, like the member for Dobell and other members in this place, have a personal connection with the sector through members of my family. But I also have a personal connection in that my main area of research when I lectured in economics at Monash University was the impact of an ageing population on our economy and on our society. It was interesting to me to reflect on the Intergenerational report most recently published by this government, which highlighted that this government isn't looking at its own published documents closely enough.

We are an ageing society. This has been happening for decades and it will happen for decades to come. It's very hard to make projections, but if there's one set of projections that you can be confident about it is demographics, with their great inertia. We know that our society will be far older in 30, 40 or 50 years than it is today. That's a good thing. It's an opportunity more than anything, but it also creates challenges. In 1974-75, 8.7 per cent of our population was over 65. Today it's a bit over 15 per cent. In 2050 it's going to be over 22 per cent. That is a transformational change in our society. This is one of the great transformational changes societies are going through as we speak.

In 1974-75 there were 120 centenarians. In 2054-55 there will be over 40,000. We are talking about a transformational change both in the need for service delivery in our society and in the way that they will need to be funded. This is also reflected in the relationship between those who are old and the number of working-age people. In 1974-75 there were 7.3 workers for each person over 65. Now it's around 4½, and in 2054 it's going to be 2.7. This is something the government needs to be creating visionary policy for, holistic policy. Instead, all we've had is budget cuts that use the aged-care sector almost as a balancing item.

We can look at the 2014-15 budget—a horror budget, the first budget of this government, the budget of broken promises. What did we see with aged care? We saw that the government took measures to adjust the real rate of growth in the Commonwealth Home Support Program, which slashed billions upon billions of dollars. Their first reaction to this complicated policy challenge was to cut. We've seen this in so many subsequent budgets. In the 2015 budget half a billion was cut from MYEFO. In the 2016 budget over a billion was cut.

The minister came here today cherrypicking statistics, trying to say that on this or that statistic things might have been a little bit better than at some point in time when Labor was in government. He must have had the Parliamentary Library working overtime trying to find any way in which this government looks good. But let's look at statistics which are unambiguous and clear and relate to how people are actually experiencing this sector. Let's look at the fact that there are 100,000 older people on the waiting list. Let's look at the fact that 30,000 older Australians died waiting. That's not implying that the deaths were caused by waiting; it's simply saying that this is a horrific circumstance to be in. For those opposite to be quibbling about the technicalities of that statistic shows how little they are in touch with what's going on on the ground.

More than 25,000 older Australians entered residential aged care prematurely. Again, any government with a sense of how to treat older Australians' complex needs in a holistic way would understand that forcing someone into residential aged care early by not funding in-home care is not only an inhumane way to treat their need; it hurts the budget bottom line because it's not treating them in a way which creates the least cost to the community and to the government.

Let's also look at the fact that not only are we getting older, but the needs of our older cohort are getting more complicated. We have growing numbers of people with a non-English-speaking background, and we know how complicated that makes aged-care services. I visited Fronditha Care in my electorate and saw how complicated it was to provide aged care to people who were reverting to their first tongue. We know dementia has all sorts of complicated challenges around workforce needs. That was raised by both the minister and the assistant minister earlier. We know that the needs of very old people are greater than those just post retirement. This is an area which requires vision. Instead, all we get is cuts after cuts.

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