David Gillespie (Lyne, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

It's my pleasure to speak on this motion, because for all Australians aged care is incredibly important. But in the beautiful Lyne electorate that I look after we have one of the oldest demographics in the country—it's even older than in the electorates of people who represent those on the Gold or Sunshine coasts, or in rural Victoria! The median age is actually 50, which is quite old, and 35.7 per cent, over one-third of the people, are over the age of 65. And we have three and a third per cent of our constituents over the age of 85. The Australian average is 2.2 per cent, so we have 50 per cent more than in most parts of the country.

Aged care has had an exceptional expansion in the Lyne electorate during the years I've had the honour of representing the people of the Lyne electorate. We've grown $90 million of annual funding up to $140 million of annual funding, and that is in the high-care residential space. But there's also been an explosion of funding for home care. We are trying to keep people ageing in their homes as best we can. It's much more favourable if we can keep people in their own environment, independence with assistance, independence with safety, independence with honour, and then they age better. The phenomenon is we are an ageing nation. With the wonders of our health system, most of us will live into our mid-80s, even me, for goodness sake, who's had all the challenges that my genetic pool has delivered me by the fickle finger of fate! You cannot change your genes; you can choose your friends, but you can't change your genes. And one of the best decisions you can make is to have parents and grandparents that live for a long time.

We live in the golden age compared to generations and civilisations past. We have modern health, we have incredible nutrition, we have too much food, which is one of our other many problems, but ageing with dignity is the aspiration of everyone. This government, former governments, even the opposition when they're in government: we're all united in what we want to achieve. But the facts of the matter are, with the ageing demographic, we are playing catch-up. To put things in perspective, people on the other side have called for more funding, while we have put bucketloads more funding into aged care. We have delivered record investment across the aged-care system. When I first entered this building in the 2012-13 financial year, it was resting at a $13.3 billion annual budget. Do you know what it's grown to now? I can tell you, Deputy Speaker. It's grown to $21.4 billion in 2019-20. By my arithmetic, that's more than seven and a bit billion dollars. That's an awfully big increase, but, because we have an ageing demographic, the demand is there and more people want to stay at home. That's why we've got this disconnect between the increase in funding in home care as opposed to the shorter time people are spending in residential care.

We also committed in this budget, as former speakers have mentioned, 44,000 new home care packages at a total of $2.7 billion. That's an enormous increase. At that same time, in 2012-13, before I entered the building, home care packages were numbered at 60,308. One would think we hadn't increased anything, but it will be 158,030 by the time this parliament ends in 2022-23, which is an increase of over 160 per cent. You'd have to be hiding under a rock to not know that there's a problem with getting these home care packages actually delivered. That's where the disconnect is. It's not because this government is not funding it; it's because we need to grow better efficiencies and get more people working in the home care space so these packages can be delivered and rolled out.

There were also comments on the other side about the aged-care royal commission. The reality is that we started the royal commission. It's delivering what we want, and that is a better aged-care system.

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