Helen Haines (Indi, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

I'm pleased today to rise in support and to second this motion from the member for Mayo, and I thank her for her longstanding commitment to improving aged-care services over many years, particularly home care, in her electorate and right across Australia. And she has good reason to be angry this morning.

Like Mayo, my electorate of Indi has an older population with a median age above 45 years, and both of our electorates are amongst the oldest electorates in this country. So we know this issue extremely well. Accessible aged-care services are vital to communities in our electorates, as they are right across regional Australia. For many, access to home-care support is often the difference between staying at home in their local community or having to pack up, leave town and go to a regional centre where residential aged care is available—uprooting their lives. People are having to do that faster than they should because of this problem with aged care in the home.

The reality is home care is harder to access in the regions than in the cities. In Indi, families face long waits, not just because there's the assessment backlog but because there are fewer home-care providers willing or able to service rural towns. In places like Bright, Corryong, Kinglake and Alexandra, older Australians are often waiting longer simply because providers cannot staff those areas. Because of the need to travel further, packages cost more to deliver in regional Australia, and yet the funding model does not adequately account for this reality. So, while the motion before the House notes that people are waiting three to six months for an assessment, I can say that in my electorate that is a conservative estimate. Without home care, families are often to fill the gap, as the member for Mayo has just told us. In regional communities this means adult children juggling work, small businesses, long commutes and unpaid caring duties.

It's why I welcomed the Aged Care Act, a new aged care act that we so desperately needed. I was optimistic, and I remain optimistic that finally, when it comes to pass, the new Support at Home program will make home care simpler and easier to access for older persons and their families.

But here's the rub. The government's six-month delay of the new act was reluctantly supported by the sector, because it is important to get this transition right. However, this delay has real-world implications for home-care support. In particular, the sector opposes the delayed release of 80,000 new home-care packages. The government has consistently rejected calls from peak bodies, such as OPAN and COTA, as well as from members of the crossbench to release, at a minimum, 20,000 packages to hold the waitlist steady until the new system commences in November.

Now, despite this commonsense approach, a commonsense call, incredibly, the minister has offered little reason for rejecting the ask and—even more extraordinarily, astonishingly—is accusing them of politicising the issue. Look, I can't understand this. While the member for Mayo's motion notes a waitlist of 86,000 people in March, the Department of Health, Disability and Ageing last week confirmed the waitlist is now above 120,000 people—an almost 50 per cent increase in six months. These are people. Now consider this. With another 87,000 people approved but not yet receiving care, this means that there are more than 200,000 Australians—staggering numbers—not getting the care they need and absolutely deserve.

It's why the current Senate inquiry into home-care delays is so important. It is already uncovering concerning figures that reinforce the need for urgent action to reduce the home-care waitlist. For example, the Department of Health and Aged Care confirmed the gridlock, admitting last week that there have been no—I mean no—additional home-care packages made available in the last two months. The 2,700 weekly plans often spruiked by the minister are not new packages but plans made available due to older persons dying or moving into residential aged care. While the minister repeatedly says that high-priority applicants would receive help within a month, high-priority applicants in my electorate are waiting months, not weeks. The fact is that the waitlist for home care is getting longer, not shorter, and this is the last thing older persons and their families need—more delays and more uncertainty when they were promised the opposite by this government.

This motion is not about political pointscoring. This motion is about listening to older Australians, looking at the data and asking the government to do what is necessary and to do what is right. I commend the member for Mayo for bringing this to the attention of the House, and it's time the Minister for Aged Care and Seniors stepped up and delivered.

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