Judith Adams (WA, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Minister for Ageing, Senator Santoro. Is the minister aware of reports in today’s media regarding the availability of aged-care beds in the community? Would the minister outline to the Senate his response to these reports?

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

I continue to appreciate Senator Adams’s strong and sincere interest in aged-care matters and also her very diligent scrutiny of opposition statements. Yes, Senator Adams and others may be aware of the report in the Canberra Times today regarding aged-care beds in the ACT. This report seems to have sprung from a media release issued by the very imaginative shadow spokesperson for the opposition, Senator McLucas. I say ‘very imaginative’ because every time that we hear from Senator McLucas she is imagining a new crisis in aged care.

Today Senator McLucas has used some very imaginative mathematics as the basis for some nonsensical claims that aged-care beds provision has fallen. What Senator McLucas has actually done—and this is very interesting—is to compare aged-care places from 2005 with a target figure set by this government to be operational as at the start of 2008. That is important for senators opposite to understand—2005 results compared with a 2008 target. On the basis of this very imaginative comparison, Senator McLucas makes incredibly imaginative claims. Senator McLucas, as she always does, has deleted community care places from her imaginative figures. That is almost 40,000 places.

Chris Evans (WA, Australian Labor Party, Leader of the Opposition in the Senate) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

They’re not beds, though, are they!

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

I will take the interjection. They are beds in people’s homes. They are people who sleep in their own beds rather than in an aged-care facility.

Chris Evans (WA, Australian Labor Party, Leader of the Opposition in the Senate) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

That’s why they’re called community care!

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

I will reel in the Leader of the Opposition in the Senate—they are in their own beds, and you want to deny people their own beds.

Paul Calvert (President) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Order! The senator will address his remarks through the chair and ignore the interjections.

Santo Santoro (Queensland, Liberal Party, Minister for Ageing) Share this | Link to 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.