Ken Wyatt (Hasluck, Liberal Party, Minister for Aged Care) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the member for her question. It's great to talk about the needs of older Australians. It is important that we talk about the way in which governments provide services, and it's important that we use the resources effectively to provide choice within the mix of the total budget that we allocate. Our allocation of budget goes to very critical programs. In response to your question, we pay in residential care for beds occupied. We provide opportunities for home care packages that allow people to have choices to live at home. When you combine the efforts of the government, we are at least providing real choice that allows Australians to either live at home or make the choice to live in residential care.

In doing that, what we considered was the forward years in terms of the number of places required in both. The number of residential beds required will continue to increase substantially. The number of home care packages will also increase in those out years. Our commitment is to make sure that across this nation, regionally and in capital cities, we give absolute choices to people. I want to identify resources that are best placed to give people that choice of home care or residential care. In our budget we have given attention to the needs of people with high-need places so that we give them the level of support, and we continually wrap around other supports out of the programs that we have within the aged-care portfolio. Because it makes no sense—

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