Christopher Pyne (Sturt, Liberal Party, Minister for Ageing) Share this | Hansard source

You were a complete disgrace with respect to aged care. You were spending $3.1 billion on aged care, $18 million on respite care, and there were 4,500 community aged care packages. You have the gall to come into the House on this bill, the Aged Care Amendment (Residential Care) Bill 2007, and again trawl through these tricky lines about ratios and places, which are completely false, causing me to have to come in here and put the record straight yet again. I have to try to fix the situation so that older people are not led to believe the calumnies that are visited upon the government yet again by the opposition.

It is unfair that the Labor Party has not used the opportunities they have had to put together a policy on aged care that talks to the people in aged care about workforce issues, IT issues, or capital raising for infrastructure issues. Instead, they keep running these scare lines against the government, upsetting older people and leading them down the garden path of disbelief, even when the facts are finally pointed out to them, which I have been doing in this debate and continue to do in the press. It is not like the Labor Party have not had opportunities to put their record to the Australian people and to talk about their policies for the future. The shadow minister, at an aged care and community care conference in Victoria, which I also attended, spoke for half and hour and at no point in that speech did she talk about what the Labor Party was proposing to do about aged care. Apparently, aged care is in crisis, according to the shadow ministers who cover this area, the member for Gellibrand and Senator McLucas—

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