Barnaby Joyce (New England, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

It's a crucial part of our life. We have the joy of birth. We look for obstetrics and maternity wards. We look for all the things. It's part and parcel of where the human condition comes into the world, and we want the security of that. When you go to a new town in so many regional areas, the first thing that the wife, the lady, wants to know is: 'Okay, if I'm going to have a baby, where am I going?' And if you can't provide that, it becomes a real downer. It becomes a mechanism by which people say, 'I'm a bit scared about going to this town.'

Then, of course, there are the schools. People want the capacity to say: 'Where are my children going to go to school? What is the school like? Does it have the capacity to look after my child in such a way that gives them the best opportunity to go on with their life, whichever way that may be?' That becomes a big consideration.

Also, they ask if they're going to get a job and what sort of job they are going to have. Where are they going to work? What sort of job will their wife or husband or partner have? Those questions are so important when considering a town—and so too are hospitals, of course, for if you get sick, and then, later on, aged care.

Aged care is very, very important. Every person goes through that time in their life, if they're lucky, when they have to consider the welfare of their parents or of people that they've grown to love and consider how they will look after them when they are vulnerable and unable to look after themselves. This is where aged care is so vitally important. Going into aged care is very similar to going to boarding school. You're going to an area that is different; it is not your home. The very disconcerting thing is that it's a boarding school you're never going to leave. This is a time of fear in people's lives, and we have a role to make sure that we placate that fear and that we provide these people with the greatest dignity we can possibly afford them. This is why this accommodation payment security levy is part and parcel with providing that security.

In my area, I spend a lot of time, as all House of Representative members no doubt do, like yourself, Madam Deputy Speaker Lawrence, going to aged-care facilities. You bring joy to a facility by being there, sitting there for smoko, talking to people—you find out that one of them has a birthday and you cut the birthday cake with them, and they've got their makeup on, so you sit and have a photo with them. Once you give one a kiss on the cheek, you've got to give them all a kiss on the cheek, otherwise they get angry with you! It's great. You get a real sense of joy being there, because of the aged-care facility and what it gives back to that person.

Years ago, when I was a senator for Queensland, I was out at Boulia, which is—you go west from Longreach and go to Winton and then you go to Boulia and up north to Mount Isa or south down to Birdsville. I used to do a bit of work at Boulia. Now, we're spending money on a road to get from Boulia down to Laverton and to Western Australia. I hope the Labor Party continues with that incredibly important road. When I spoke to people in Boulia, their big town was Longreach; the big smoke was Longreach. I'd say, 'What do you want?' They'd say: 'I want the capacity to retire and die in Boulia, because that's where I'm from. I'm not from Longreach. I'm not from Winton. I'm certainly not from Mount Isa. I want to live my life out in Boulia.' This is why, as part of this debate, we've got to make sure that aged care fits the requirements of all regional areas.

I want to mention three in my electorate—Denman, Corindi and Emmaville. I went to Emmaville aged care facility. It's community run. That's when there was a birthday, and I had to preside over the birthday, and it was really nice. They grabbed me and sat me down and said: 'We are going to go broke unless people clearly understand we're a community based facility. We are a not-for-profit. There is nobody who owns us.' People in these regional towns, with the requirements that governments have put on them, say, 'I'm not going to make myself vulnerable or liable for the requirements of an aged-care facility for which I'm merely doing this as charity. I'm on the board as charity.' We've got to be careful. The requirements for a 24-hour registered nurse and all these things—we've got to understand that in Emmaville or Denman or Corindi, if their aged-care facilities close down, those people have nowhere to go. There is no alternative. They can't all go down to Tamworth and go into palliative care; there's just nowhere to go. It'll be dynamite. You literally, almost, have to put them back out on the street.

We've got to be very mindful in how we do this and understand that it's not all the aged-care facilities of Lane Cove or Maribyrnong; it's aged-care facilities in little regional towns. There's got to be that nuance in this where you let these people come in, and you understand that, when they walk in the door, you're talking to people who are doing this for charity. It was the same in Corindi—

A division having been called in the House of Representatives

Sitting suspended from 12:15 to 12:31

As I was saying, it's issues about how aged care and aged-care policy understand the requirements of community based facilities in small regional areas for which, if those community based facilities are removed, there is no facility; there is no alternative. If I take Emmaville for instance, we are seeing people come in from an unfortunately long way away from Emmaville to an obscure little town called Emmaville because there's no alternative closer to where they're from. We also see the same thing at Denman. At Denman, there are people from Merriwa, from Singleton and from all around that come to the Denman community aged-care facility because they have no aged-care facility in their town. We've really got to make sure that there is a nuance in the policy structure that understands this.

I'll give you a classic example of where a nuance is causing massive problems, and I'll go back to the Denman facility. In the Denman facility, we have fought for and received a $9.2 million grant. I thank the government for a $9.2 million grant—exceptional! We have people lined up to get into this community aged-care facility which also has palliative care, end-of-life care, in the Hunter Valley, where people have lived all their lives—an area which provides all the coal and the resources that have propped up our nation. They're good people who work there. Before I was a member, it used to be in Dan's seat, and then I took over.

I went to the league and the nurses there said: 'We've got to catch up with you. We've got some issues with what's happening in the aged-care facility.' So I caught up with them, and they drove me up there, and I went and had a yarn with them. Just listen to this: they have a 10-acre paddock for expansion on. Your old style western suburbs block was a quarter of an acre. This is a 10-acre paddock. It's not big. There are a couple of trees on it and a little bit of a gully with an old stock fence surrounding it. There is nothing spectacular about this at all. It's in the middle of the Hunter Valley, so we're not in the Amazon jungle or in Alpine areas. It's just a paddock with a couple of trees on it that is proximate to where their aged-care facility is, which is where they have to expand to because they're blocked in where they are. They have to pay a carbon offset to build on that paddock.

Listen to this carefully: to build units for aged-care people and for people in palliative care so they can move out of their houses and into aged care and therefore free up the houses for other people to live in—that's another part of the equation—it is going to cost that aged-care facility $3.51 million to pay the carbon offsets to some greaser out there for the paddock they own. That's $3.51 million for carbon offsets that has to be paid by an aged-care facility to some carbon trader.

Now, let's just turn that on its head, on the virtue side of it. Where would that money better be spent? I'm going to make this crazy assertion that maybe, if they didn't have to pay it to some greaser who is probably a multimillionaire and who's basically buying and selling nothing that's called 'carbon offsets', they could build more aged-care units, they could look after more people, they could create the mechanism for more people to be treated with dignity in their lives, they would be able to shorten the waiting time to get into the Denman aged-care facility and, by so allowing people to go to the Denman aged-care facility, we would have more free houses for people who do not have a house to move into, because the grandparents will have moved out of their houses.

This is insane. I've put it on Facebook, I've put it around and I'm talking about here in the chamber. This is something that the government should get on to. It's something where the minister should say, 'What on earth's happening there? Billy, go find out if that bloke's talking a load of garbage. Just find out if that's the truth. Chase that up for me and then come back.' 'Minister, we've made a call to the Denman aged-care facility. Unfortunately, it's the truth.' 'Okay. I'm going to fix this; I'm going to fix this today. I'm going to do something splendid for the people of the Hunter Valley and for Australia in general. I'm going to ring up the other minister and say, "Can we scrub this craziness? Have you got a ministerial discretion? Good! Use your discretion right now, ring them up and say 'Congratulations! We've just landed you another $3.51 million that you can now spend on units,' which is what we want in aged care. And say to the greaser who thought they were in line for $3.51 million off a community aged-care facility and community members, 'Unfortunately, it was a bad day in the office for you, because you're not getting your money.'"' That's the sort of thing we—not we but the government—can do.

There you go; I've told you again. People sit back and go, 'Who could dream this rubbish up?' I didn't believe it. I thought, 'You're having a go at me.' I've done it on a Facebook post. She actually said, 'Okay, Cyclone, here's the documentation,' and there it was. They were talking about $3.5 million or $3.51 million and said, 'We might be able to get this down a bit.' For what?

We need to be more dynamic in dealing with aged care across all sectors and able to say, 'Okay, we need a policy for community based aged care in small regional towns. We need to understand. We need to have a proper audit. What do we actually need to do, not to put more costs on you but to help you so that you can stay open and grow, because there are more and more people?' The baby boomers, as we know, are going into aged care, and we've got to try and become more dynamic so that these people have got somewhere to go. My daughter is a doctor. In Tamworth they do not have the room in palliative care for anybody. There is no room, so the idea that you would close down an aged-care facility is dynamite, because there literally is nowhere for these people to go. So we've got to keep these facilities open. To go back to their homes means the families have to look after them. If we botch this—and it's 'we'; it's everybody in Canberra—then probably the only place they can go is back into their homes.

I am very, very lucky. I've got a big old Catholic family out in the bush. We've got a big heap of us. We looked after both my mum and my dad until they died. Dad died at 98½. Mum had a serious stroke, and we still looked after mum after her stroke until she died. My brother's a doctor. Pat looked after her down at Wollongong. So we're very blessed. Why do I bring this up? It's very expensive to look after your parents in your home. It's probably a minimum of $2½ thousand a week. That's about what it costs. If we don't have aged-care facilities, there are very few families that have $2½ thousand a week per parent. You've got to have nurses 24 hours a day, or you've got to have family members who are nurses and who are doctors to look after them.

In closing, can we please have a close look at and nuance the regional facilities—especially the community based ones—and can you, Minister, please ring up the Denman community aged-care facility and say, 'We want to talk to you about how we scrub this $3.51 million that you've got to pay for a carbon offset.'

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