Anne Aly (Cowan, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The last four years of my father's life were spent in an aged-care facility. He'd contracted vascular dementia, and we had to find a locked facility for him. We were lucky that we found a kind and caring environment for him, but we shouldn't have had to rely on luck. No Australian should. So it's absolutely galling that this Prime Minister denies and walks away from the massive cuts to aged care brought about by himself as the Treasurer. Yesterday, he said it was a lie to say that he had cut funding to aged care, but the budget papers don't lie. They state that the government will achieve efficiencies of $1.2 billion over four years. Aged-care workers aren't lying when they tell us about the conditions in which they work and the increasing staff-to-patient ratios. The facts don't lie. The standards in the care for older Australians have plummeted under the weight of these cuts. This government needs to do better, and a royal commission now just doesn't cut it. They should have known about it ages ago. They need to do better by our older Australians, but the Liberals are too distracted by their own internal squabbles. Meanwhile, older Australians and their families continue to have to rely on luck. It's just not good enough. It's not good enough that, in a country like Australia, our older Australians, who have worked hard all their lives, are left to die in aged-care facilities where the standards are degrading.