Madeleine King (Brand, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Trade) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Prime Minister. The commissioners presiding over the aged-care royal commission have said:

Had the Australian Government acted upon previous reviews of aged care, the persistent problems in aged care would have been known much earlier and the suffering of many people could have been avoided.

Why is the Prime Minister refusing to take responsibility for the avoidable suffering and death which his failures have caused?

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

I have already said on numerous occasions in this place the responsibility that we've taken and the apologies, which have been absolutely necessary.

This is what we've announced since the royal commission was called—when I called that royal commission: $3 billion since the 2018-19 budget into home-care packages; 14,275 new residential care places, including 13½ thousand residential places and 775 short-term restorative care places; $5.3 billion from 1 July 2020 to June 2022 for existing Commonwealth Home Support Program service providers to ensure continuity of in-home support services for over 840,000 older Australians across Australia; $21.9 million for My Aged Care operating costs; a $320 million boost to residential care subsidies; giving service providers operating in residential home care to independent business advisory services—all programs going forward into the future, I note; almost $50 billion for a Business Improvement Fund to assist residential care providers in financial difficulty; a 30 per cent increase to the viability supplement to support services in rural and remote Australia; a 30 per cent increase to the homelessness supplement; established a new independent Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission; implemented new consumer focused Aged Care Quality Standards; introduced a mandatory National Quality Indicator Program; put in place a new single Charter of Aged Care Rights; provided $5.6 million to implement phase 1 of the home care compliance framework; implemented new provider requirements to minimise physical and chemical restraint in aged care; and $25.5 million to improve medication management, noting that this may also assist to reduce the use of chemical and physical restraints.

I note all of these measures, and there are many more. I know they've all been done with the support of those opposite—I understand that in most cases, if not all cases. These are the actions which we continue to take since the royal commission was only announced. That demonstrates that the government will continue to take action each and every day, as we indeed have again today, with over half a billion dollars to further extend the COVID-19 supplementary arrangements for aged-care support, to ensure that those facilities are supported both on a viability basis—and when I say 'viability basis', to ensure they have the additional resources to provide the COVID support in those facilities—and also the workforce supports to retain that workforce, which is so necessary. We are investing more than a billion dollars extra a year in aged care every single year.

I return to the point I made earlier today, and that is that at the last election, when we set out our aged-care plan, when we set out the aged-care in-home places, in particular, policies in aged care that we thought were necessary to address the additional demands, they were supported by the Labor Party at that election and they did not offer one extra cent and they did not suggest one extra place in any home-based care at that election. (Time expired)