Greg Hunt (Flinders, Liberal Party, Minister for Health) Share this | Hansard source

I want to thank the member for Indi, and I appreciate the intent, sincerity and focus in relation to this. One of the most significant sources of investment in the budget was precisely to address home-care places—$1.6 billion was invested to further reduce wait times. I'm advised that, at this point in time, 98 per cent of those who are seeking home-care packages have been given access to support through the Commonwealth Home Support Program or the Home Care Packages Program, but we want to make sure that reaches 100 per cent. That's why we invested $1.6 billion in 26,000 places, as part of the budget. Those places come on top of an extra 3,000 places, which were announced in recent months, and indeed they come on top of an increase from 60,000 places, when we came into government, to 185,000 places, before the end of this year.

So what we are doing to address what I think is a very important and real and significant question is to invest on a scale vastly above that which has ever occurred before. To put it in perspective, there has been a 28 per cent increase in those over 70 since we came into government, there has been a tripling or a 200 per cent increase in the number of places available for home care, and there has been a quadrupling or a 300 per cent increase in the total funding available, from $1.15 billion to $4.5 billion over the course of next financial year. All of those are immensely important, but, at the same time, they come on the back of the work that's been done to improve quality—the adoption of quality indicators, the royal commission, which the Prime Minister called at his earliest time upon coming into office—

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