John Williams (NSW, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate take note of the answer given by the Special Minister of State (Senator Ludwig) to a question without notice asked by Senator Williams today relating to residential aged care.

I am very serious when I raise these issues about caring for our elderly. Surely, one of the greatest obligations we must have in this nation is to look after those who have worked so hard and have given us so much. I find it concerning that, no matter where I travel in the state of New South Wales, the message is clear from all those in aged care. In July I was out at St Annes at Broken Hill. It is a wonderful facility, but it is under pressure. It simply cannot make enough money to increase the size of the facility to meet the demand for aged care in that area.

I am fortunate to live in Northern New South Wales at a place called Inverell. Just south of Inverell is the small community of Bundarra, in which there is the Grace Munro aged-care facility. Unless the minister can come up with more money in the next few weeks, that facility will close. When it was full, with 10 or 11 beds, and being run by McLean Retirement Village, a provider from Inverell, McLean could not make a profit. Over recent months they have reduced their number of beds to seven. The provider has been losing an enormous amount of money each year so it has had to make the commercial decision to close that facility in this small community.

I want to raise this point: it is a sad day when we are shutting down our aged-care facilities, especially in small communities. To give a typical example, the male member of an elderly couple may get to the stage where he needs nursing care but find, when he needs to go into the local nursing home, there is none. So he might be shipped off to some other nursing home that is 50, 80 or 100 kilometres away and placed in higher care nursing there. His wife would then have to travel the 80 or 100 kilometres to visit him. It is very sad to see that this does happen when aged-care facilities close down. To me it is outrageous that, when one of a couple who have been together for decades—married for 40 or 50 years—has to go into an aged-care facility, the spouse staying at home may have to travel so far to visit their loved one.

It angers me to see that the Labor government proposes to spend some $60 billion on stimulus packages but there is not one cent for aged-care facilities. Whose obligation is it to look after the elderly? We have seen the money going into the pink batts and $14.7 billion or more being borrowed and put into state schools, which are a state responsibility, yet how much is going into aged-care facilities, which are a federal responsibility? The answer is: virtually nothing. Now we have got facilities closing.