Mark Butler (Hindmarsh, Australian Labor Party, Deputy Leader of the House) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the Leader of the Opposition for her question. Over the last five years, we have, as a country, pretty much doubled the number of home-care packages in the system, from about 150,000 to a little more than 300,000, and we will need to continue increasing those home-care package numbers vary significantly for, really, as long as any of us are in this parliament, because the oldest of the baby boomers, we know, are now pretty much hitting the average age of entry to the Home Care Packages system and in a few years time will hit to the average age of entry into the residential aged-care system. That is why, particularly under the leadership of former minister Wells in this area, we had to compress pretty much a decade of reform into just three years—not helped of course by the budget cuts that the opposition leader initiated as the minister for aged care through the 2016 MYEFO that actually took money out of aged care and didn't redeploy it to reform but actually just returned it to general revenue, obviously contributing to the situation that led to the royal commission in the first place. So it doesn't really sound very nice in the opposition leader's mouth to complain about the situation in aged care that we have had to fix over the last three years after a decade not just of neglect but of actual cuts initiated again by the now opposition leader when she had responsibility for this portfolio.

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