Warren Snowdon (Lingiari, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for External Territories) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Prime Minister. Prime Minister, sadly, the Productivity Commission has revealed that four out of five older Territorians are not having their care needs met. This rate's doubled since your cuts to aged care. Prime Minister, do you take any responsibility for the $1.7 billion cuts to aged care and the impact that they have had on older Territorians, which has left them a lot worse off? What are you going to do about it?

Scott Morrison (Cook, Liberal Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Once again, what is put forward by the member opposite in relation to the funding of aged care is not correct. It misrepresents completely, as I've already outlined to the House. I'll ask the Minister for Health to respond further.

Greg Hunt (Flinders, Liberal Party, Minister for Health) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

In adding to the Prime Minister's answer, I think simple facts will help address the question. When we came to government, there was an approximate budget of $13 billion for aged care. That has now grown, in the year just completed, to almost $22 billion and to $23 billion, $24 billion and $25 billion over the course of the forward estimates. Most significantly, what we've also seen, as part of that, is the growth in home care from, as the Prime Minister said, 60,000 packages to 164,000 packages over the course of this budget—from 60,000 to 164,000 at the end of the current forward estimates period. That's an increase of 150 per cent. There were some comments before: 'Gosh, the population has continued to age.' With all of these figures—home care and residential care, both in terms of places and in terms of funding—overall aged-care funding has grown at a significantly faster rate than the rate at which older Australians have increased.

The reason we've done this is that we have realised that that which was there before us was inadequate. That's why we are nearly doubling the funding over the course of our time in government compared with what it was under the previous government. That's a commitment that has entailed very serious ongoing work from the Expenditure Review Committee and from the cabinet and others. It's meant that in 2020, for example, we've provided more than $1 billion in funding to assist older Australians in aged care during the COVID-19 pandemic. What we've been able to do is invest $3 billion since the 2018-19 budget to provide an additional 50,000 home-care packages. I might draw an interesting comparison here, though. Given the opportunity to invest only a year ago, how much did the opposition invest in new home-care places? Zero. As they went to the election, how much did the opposition invest in new residential care places? Zero. So for all of this discussion, at a time when the Prime Minister had called a royal commission, had highlighted the importance of this issue and had emphasised the importance with the investment in residential care and home-care places, there was nothing from the opposition.