Santo Santoro (Queensland, Liberal Party, Minister for Ageing) Share this | Hansard source

That is almost 40,000 places nationwide that the senators opposite would like to simply imagine do not exist—beds in people’s own homes. Let us see what other contradictions Senator McLucas makes. Even with all of this imaginative mathematics, Senator McLucas’s media release still shows an actual increase in numbers nationwide of 2,459. I have had the details just brought to me—and I will table this: in actual operational places in December 2005, 163,345; in June 2006, 165,804. What those figures clearly show is that Senator McLucas cannot even read the base material that is made available to her and which we circulate—nearly 2½ thousand extra operational places in six months. But what was the headline on her media release? It was ‘Aged-care provision falls under Minister Santoro’, when she circulates publicly available material that clearly indicated the opposite.

Even by Senator McLucas’s standards, it boggles the mind how one can imagine a reduction in bed numbers when your own figures show a major increase. The government is not resting on its laurels, because it continues to create new places, not only in aged facilities but also in people’s own homes, which those opposite seem to regard as not real beds. High-care community aged-care packages; low-care packages—40,000 of them, up from your 4,880 when Labor left office in 1996. There are people sleeping in their own beds and the opposition ignores them.