Richard Colbeck (Tasmania, Liberal Party, Minister for Aged Care and Senior Australians) Share this | Hansard source

Thanks, Senator Wong, for the question. As Senator Wong has indicated, today the government announced a significant package totalling $537 million to add additional capacity into the aged-care system as an immediate response to the royal commission's interim report. In that $537 million there was about $500 million for an additional 10,000 packages.

The reason that the government has made the response that we have is that we've taken notice of the royal commission's interim report, which talks about the growth of demand for home care packages as additional capacity is being put into the system. It talks about concerns about significant growth of home care packages and creating a circumstance like the Labor Party created when they put the pink batts program into place—there was so much capacity put into the market that it brought in shonky players and ended up leading to four deaths.

So the royal commission's report talks about doing a number of things. It talks about putting additional capacity into the system, which we've done. But it also talks about changing the way that home care is delivered, and so we are inclined to do that. The royal commission said in the report that it would be looking to provide some advice to the government on how the home care delivery system would be modified. We've said that we will take notice of that.

The Labor Party really should have a read of the report. We've done that. We're responding to it.