Gordon Reid (Robertson, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I have to agree with some of the opening remarks that the member for Casey just made. I agree that we should absolutely support our older Australians both at home and in residential aged care. People in Australia deserve to age with dignity and deserve to age with respect. But what I would say to the member for Casey is: in the 10 years that the coalition government were in power, why was that not the case? You talk about these record investments in residential aged care and these record investments in home-care packages, but I gotta tell you: when I was working in the hospital and saw these people coming in both from home and from the aged-care sector, we were still seeing staff shortages and we were seeing residents not get the care that they needed or that they deserved.

What does that look like in real terms? I'm talking about large pressure areas, large wounds, on the back of the head and on the back of the hips that went down to bone and were covered in maggots. That's what I'm talking about when I see no investment in aged care. I'm talking about people sitting in their own excrement in their home and in aged-care facilities because there's no staff and no funding in that sector. I'm talking about real people in these real conditions who end up grossly unwell and then require tertiary critical level support.

So I agree that we need to support our elderly Australians, but that was not the case and I'm not going to be lectured by the opposition on home-care wait times. When they were last in government, they allowed these home-care package waitlists to increase to almost three years for some package levels. They saw 129,000 elderly Australians on that waitlist—double what it is now—and they only acted and started to do something about it when they realised it was a problem.

A government member: Right before the election.

Right before the election—absolutely right. That is the definition of a coalition government: reactive. They're never proactive. They don't see the benefit in making sure that our society remains healthy and our people can age with dignity.

So we can stop it with the lecturing and focus on what the Albanese Labor government is doing in this space to make it better for older Australians. We know that older Australians want to stay at home for longer. The Albanese Labor government is ensuring that older Australians can access a home-care package more quickly, and from next year we will deliver the game changing Support at Home program, because we believe that older Australians should have the opportunity to age where they want to, and for many Australians that's in their own home. In the 2024-25 federal budget handed down by Jim Chalmers, the Treasurer, the government is investing $531.4 million to fund an extra 24,100 home-care packages by 30 June 2025. This investment is expected to bring wait times down to an average of six months from assessment. It's going to support older Australians to stay in their homes for longer and bring the number of people supported by home-care packages to a record 300,000. People assessed as having urgent care needs—urgent care needs, Member for Casey—approved as a high priority are typically being assigned their home-care packages within one month. These are some of the reforms that we are making in the aged-care space. We are making sure that we are putting the money where it needs to go to make sure that elderly Australians can age at home.

I have to say the Albanese Labor government listen to older Australians—and the aged-care sector too, because people do work in it—and we are committed to delivering ambitious reforms to in-home aged care that will serve the needs of all older people in Australia now and into the future. The new Support at Home program is on track to start on 1 July 2025, and more details will be released in due course. This new program will give older Australians better access to care, better control and faster access when it is introduced.

So, looking at our aged-care reforms and the money that we're investing in aged care, and looking also at health care—affordable medicine, urgent care and general practice—we see that all of these things are helping our older Australians and making sure that we have a happy and healthy society.

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