Rebekha Sharkie (Mayo, Centre Alliance) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to support the member for Casey's motion. Week after week, I'm contacted by elderly residents or their family members, and those residents are struggling to get a home-care package. They've been assessed and they're just waiting. And those wait times have blown out. For the life of me, I can't work out why this is not front-page news.

If we go back to February 2023, the wait time was between one month and three months, across all levels of home-care packages. This is what I think most Australians would think is a reasonable timeframe. Now, if you are assessed as needing a level 3 package, the wait list—and the new data came out last week—is between 12 and 15 months for a level 3, and up to nine months for a level 4, the highest level package.

To my thinking, if you are assessed as needing a level 3 or 4 package, you need it immediately. You don't need it in nine months or 15 months. This, I believe, is a national shame. I think it's a failure of the minister and it's a failure of the government.

So the question is: why is this happening? The answer, to me, is very clear, and it's in the motion. It's because last year, in the budget, there were only 9½ thousand new home-care packages, and in this year 's budget we've seen an allocation of 24½ thousand. This is why we've had this blowout.

Let me tell you about some of the stories. I had two constituents, elderly women in their late 90s, who were assessed as having 'medium' priority, despite one suffering two falls and being confined to a chair during that time. Her family was told she would have to wait months for her priority to be reassessed. I fail to see how she was not given high priority from the get-go. How is that reasonable? I had another elderly constituent who was approved for a level 4 home-care package in 23 September. Despite being terminally ill, she was also allocated only 'medium' priority. After contacting my office and asking for assistance, she was advised that the timeline of one to three months was only a guideline and, sadly, we believe this person passed away without accessing any care. Another elderly constituent was approved for a level 3 package in August last year. Nine months later, that package has not come to fruition.

The minister is very well aware of the long waiting list for aged care at home. The minister, out of every person in this place, should know the importance of a home-care package. I play it with a straight bat. I'm not part of the government, and I'm not part of the opposition. I look at the data, and I look at what my constituents are bringing to me. We were in a better place two years ago with respect to the waitlist for home care than we are today. We have, as of December last year, more than 51,000 elderly Australians waiting, and that figure is six months old. We don't have an updated figure. So the 24,000 packages allocated in this year's budget are not going to even halve the number of people on the waitlist.

Why is the government not addressing this? I think it's because we don't have the media pressure that we had that forced the previous government to have a royal commission into aged care. We needed it, and the report was titled Neglect. But, three years on, people think we had a royal commission and that the problem is fixed. We don't have the media pushing this along, along with some of us members of parliament. We need every Australian who is in this scenario or whose family is in this scenario to contact their MP and to contact the media. We need to have an angry community about this because it is not fair.

I desperately ask the media: if you're listening to this, if you flicked over to the Federation Chamber wondering what's happening in here, these are stories that you need to share with the Australian community. We should all be outraged. How can this be? A person in their 90s is waiting at home tonight, possibly chairbound or bedbound, and not getting care. We are a better nation than this. I would urge the government: you said you were going to put the care back in aged care so, for goodness sake, start doing it.

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