Anne Ruston (SA, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Health and Aged Care) Share this | Hansard source

You made a comment about the reason that 83,000 packages would be able to be released into the market in 2025-26. You said it was the co-contribution, and it's interesting that you don't know what the co-contribution is to that. Nonetheless, I'm very interested. This program doesn't start until 1 July 2025. There are significant grandfathering provisions contained within this to make sure that anybody who's already on their aged-care journey is not going be negatively impacted. I still don't quite understand how we've gone from 24,100 to 83,000 in the space of one year, but, obviously, that's very good news for older Australians who are looking for access to government funded and supported aged care.

As I said, we'll be supporting Senator David Pocock's amendments in relation to transparency around wait times and waiting lists, and thank him very much for the really constructive way that he has engaged in this process in support of older Australians who are currently languishing on very long waiting lists and for very long wait times.