Anika Wells (Lilley, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Aged Care) Share this | Hansard source

I appreciate that those opposite would love to run an unfounded scare campaign on something like the family home. I appreciate it must be very tempting when they have nothing else to talk about. But what Labor believes is that we actually need to do something about aged care. That is an equitable, sustainable and trusted sector that puts people, including older people, back at the centre of aged care. That's what we need to do.

So we are not going to rush the release of the report that the deputy leader refers to, nor are we going to pre-empt any decisions of the report until we have taken the time to do this properly. This is something that they neglected for nine long years on their watch. In fact, the deputy leader, when she was Minister for Health, cut funding from residential aged care and starved them of the funds that they needed to care for older Australians. After a decade of neglecting the sector for older Australians, after nearly a decade of neglecting this important reform, if they are now showing an interest in care, I welcome it. If they want to work together on this, I welcome it. But, if they want to go scaremongering, they're going to need to go elsewhere, because we are focused on options to make aged-care funding simple, fair and sustainable. This was the taskforce's job, and we are doing this in an open way and in consultation with the sector, with older people, with the public and with experts—something they never had the guts to do themselves, I might add. This is about government investing in quality care that older people want, need and deserve, and we will continue to do just that.

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