Julie Owens (Parramatta, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I've been listening carefully to the speeches by members of the government all day today, and I have to say in many ways we really do live in two different worlds. For me, the budget that we have just seen the government deliver, at the end of its third term—looking for a fourth term in government—is a budget for the wrong decade. It's a budget that doesn't look ahead, that doesn't address the real issues facing our economy and our population. It doesn't address the issues of housing. It doesn't really act on climate change. It doesn't really address the needs of aged care. It doesn't address the needs of child care. It does some things. There are nice announcements in the budget that talk about these things, but when you actually get down to the detail there's very little there that will actually make a difference. It is an election budget.

When you look at the history of this government over the last three terms what you will see is in the first term of government they cut like crazy. They cut, cut, cut. We watched Prime Minister Abbott do it. We watched Prime Minister Turnbull do it. We watched Prime Minister Morrison do it—cut, cut, cut. Then in the third year, just before the election, out comes the money, in most cases to fix the crisis that they caused by cutting in years one and two. And this is what we've got now. We've got a much bigger spending splash, because COVID seems to have given them a change of heart and they now believe in spending enormous amounts of money—in fact, $1 trillion in debt with no sign whatsoever of ever being able to manage that debt. It's a bigger spend, but it's still essentially headline grabbing, let's win an election, spending. There is very little there that will actually make the changes that we as a society and as a country need.

I want to start with one of the biggest, splashiest announcements that the government have made, which is about aged care. We really do need to talk about aged care. We've known about the ageing population for many decades now. When he was Treasurer Peter Costello made a huge fuss about it, so did Paul Keating when he was Treasurer. We've known about it for a long time. Every year we have more and more people in the post-retirement age, if you like, and our costs keep going up and our needs keeps going up. We've known about it for a long time. The government has cut funding to aged care for three terms. Rather than grow aged care, rather than sit down and work out what we as a country need, they have cut the budget year after year in real terms. This is not a government that has displayed any commitment to aged care. In fact, there have been 22 reviews into aged care that have condemned the state of aged care during these three terms. There have been 22 reviews that have said something needs to be done. The biggest and most extraordinary one, of course, was the royal commission, which put out an interim report called Neglect. It said that 60 per cent of residents were malnourished, that people were lying in faeces and still the government did nothing. They did nothing and then they did nothing and then they did nothing. Then a few months before an election they decide to do something.

I say to anybody out there who is paying attention to this and listening to this: you need to consider whether you're going to trust a government that has been cutting the hell out of it for three terms. It comes along when the crisis is so bad that an interim royal commission calls its report Neglect. The report says that 60 per cent of residents in aged care are malnourished. Then you do nothing until an election is called and then you make a big splash.

Let's look at detail of it. I'm going to start initially just by looking at the home-care packages. We have known for years that there was a waiting list for home-care packages. Home-care packages, for people who don't know, are for when a person decides to age at home and they get people coming in to provide services for them on an aged-care package. There are various levels, from a really simple one where someone just comes in and gives a small amount of help, to level 4, which is really quite substantial. The waiting list for these have been going on for ages. I have been speaking about the waiting list on these for years now. It has sat at around 120,000 people on the waiting list for several years. In fact, the more you need the care, the longer you'll wait. If you really need a substantial amount of care, you're probably likely to die before you get it. That's where we have been for years, and the government has done nothing.

The royal commission made a recommendation that the government must immediately increase the home-care packages available, allocate a package to all people on the waiting list that do not yet have a package or do not yet have a package at the level they have been approved for by 31 December, and keep the waiting list clear. It's an absolutely clear recommendation by the royal commission. What we got from the government is an additional 80,000 home-care packages over two years. We have a waiting list over 100,000 now, and it grows every year because every year there are new home-care packages coming on and people coming off them. It grows every year, so 80,000 home-care packages over the next two years won't even clear the waiting list that we have now. It won't keep up at all. It will not solve the problem. It's a bandaid. It is a bandaid to stick on a crisis of this government's making. That's what it is. This government created this crisis by doing nothing and by cutting funding to aged care, and now they're sticking a bandaid on it and saying, 'Well, 80,000 home-care packages over two years.' It won't even cover the current waiting list. It won't do it. It is not enough. They are not doing enough. That's before you get into the other aspects of the home-care packages that need reviewing. This is simply: 'Stick a bandaid on it. It won't solve it, but it'll get us through the election. We can say we're doing it.' Watch what happens if they win again. Watch what happens if this government gets a fourth term. They will go back to where they have been for the last three years. This is an election budget. Make no mistake about it.

There is another aspect of aged care that the government is claiming to do something about: nutrition. The royal commission said that 60 per cent of residents were malnourished. They are literally starving in aged care. If people listening don't think it's going to affect them, one in two women and one in three men end up in residential aged care at the end of their life. So look around. If there are two of you in the room, one of you is likely to end up in residential aged care if you're women, and one in three if you're men. This is going to affect everybody. It's already affecting our parents, our partners, our grandparents—you name it. People are actually starving in residential aged care right now.

The royal commission came out with very strong recommendations about the need to increase the allocation for each person, but they also said that there needed to be incredibly strict accountability measures including public reporting that includes 'details of the provider's expenditure to meet the basic needs of residents, especially their nutritional needs'. In other words, transparency. Holding the aged-care providers to account. What the government has done instead is provide a nice splashy announcement of an extra $10 per day per resident for providers, but with no requirement to report. When they made this announcement, by the way, the share price of some of the biggest aged-care providers went up. That pretty much tells you what investors out there think is going to happen with this money. There is no guarantee whatsoever that this $10 per day will actually go into nutrition or go to residents at all. There is no guarantee. A lot of aged-care providers will use it the way it should be used, but there are a hell of a lot of others that won't. There is no guarantee. Again, it's a nice splashy announcement to get them through the election. Then after that, stories will come out of another person's mum or another person's partner effectively starving in an aged-care facility. It will get them through the election, and that's all.

When it comes to aged care I also want to talk about the workforce. The royal commission made very strong recommendations about the workforce. We all know—all of us that have visited an aged-care facility, have spoken to workers or have known someone in an aged-care facility—that the staff can be amazing, but they don't have the time to do the work that they need to do or want to do. They are struggling. They are working longer hours than they should. They're not going home. They are working unbelievably hard. The residents tell me how great the staff are, but there are not enough of them and they cannot do the amount of work that they need to do. And they're leaving in large numbers, so there's a need for a larger workforce, as well as a workforce that is actually more available to its residents.

At the moment, aged-care workers start out at about $21.90 an hour. That is one of the lowest rates around. You can earn much more than that stacking shelves in a supermarket. You can earn more money than that at McDonald's. So the people that we trust to look after some of the most important people in our lives at their most vulnerable moments are some of the worst-paid people in the country. If you go and talk to those workers on a day when one of their residents has died, they are crushed. The real infrastructure in an aged-care facility is the relationship between the residents and the people who care for them. In a service sector, that is the thing which is your real infrastructure. That's what you pay for. That's what makes your product, if you want to think of it in those terms, valuable. It's not the building. The building is very nice and you have to have one, but it's the level of belonging and attachment that people have in an aged-care facility that actually makes life worth living. It's about people.

You cannot solve the crisis in aged care, which is of this government's making, without dealing with the workforce issues. They are underpaid, they're not staying long enough, they're taking other jobs and they do not have the time to actually spend with the residents in the way that is needed—they just don't. There is nothing in this aged-care plan that—nothing at all. There is nothing that deals with the chronic shortage of aged-care workers. Again, we've been talking about that in this place for years. I've spoken about it at least four times. We've known for years that there is nothing in this plan that actually addresses the fundamental issue in aged care, which is the workforce.

I also want to talk about housing. The government, again, has made a nice, splashy announcement about the Family Home Guarantee. It is interesting that, when you look at all the policies that the government has for home ownership, affordable housing or whatever you want to call it, they're all demand driven. They're all about increasing demand, which pushes up prices. So we have taxpayers subsidising this person and that person and that other person to own a home. Other taxpayers are paying for that. For the taxpayers who don't get on that little train, the price goes up. So they give their taxes to another person, and then housing becomes less affordable for them.

The government has a really interesting strategy. But this particular one, the Family Home Guarantee, is really interesting for what it is not. The government spruiks these 10,000 new places for single parents with dependants. Essentially, the government will guarantee 18 per cent of the deposit. So, with two per cent of the deposit, a single parent can buy a house, effectively, if they can afford to do it. The measure will allow single parents with a household income of less than $125,000 to access this scheme. Housing advocates have welcomed the change, but they also point out that the benefit will really only flow to single parents earning between $80,000 and $125,000. The median income for a single parent with one child is $54,000 after tax. So you have the median of $54,000 after tax and you have the median price in Parramatta of $1.2 million for a house and $620,000 for a unit. You have data from the Melbourne Institute showing that there's only one suburb in all of Sydney where a person on even $80,000 would be able to afford to buy, and that is Carramar, out in the west. The median price out there is $345,150. A single parent with two children with a median income of $56,000 would be able to borrow only that amount. So the number of single parents who could access this scheme is actually quite small. It will be a very small cohort. Good for them! That will get them into home ownership.

If you look at the numbers, there will be 10,000 new place over four years. That is 10,000 homes over four years. It's capped. That's 2½ thousand homes a year. There are 150 electorates, so I reckon that if the scheme were spread out evenly over each electorate in the whole country—which it probably won't be—Parramatta would get 16 houses. Sixteen single parents a year would actually make it into this scheme under that cap. The numbers look really good. It's a nice flashy thing: 10,000 people, four years, 2,500 a year, 150 electorates. There are one million single parents in Australia, by the way, so assistance for 10,000 isn't going to go that far. But sit down and work out what it actually means for your electorate. It means 16 or 17 parents per year, if they can afford it. And even then it will be the parents at the upper end. It won't be the median, those on $55,000 or so; it'll be the people who earn $80,000 or more. It's a nice, splashy announcement, but it won't do very much at all.

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