Sam Birrell (Nicholls, National Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Regional Health) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That this House:

(1) notes the failure of the Government to deliver adequate aged care beds, with only 802 new residential aged care beds despite an annual need for more than 10,000 new beds;

(2) condemns the Government for forcing older Australians to remain in hospital beds with no medical need, leaving them 'effectively homeless' due to a severe shortage of aged care placements, at the expense of other patients needing urgent care;

(3) acknowledges the serious warnings from state health ministers, including from New South Wales and South Australian ministers, that this failure is blocking hospital beds, contributing to bed block in emergency departments, cancelled surgeries, and gridlock across public hospital systems; and

(4) further notes that the Government claims to be investing in aged care but the current approach is clearly failing older Australians, hospital staff and patients, and demonstrates yet another example of the Government announcing big promises without delivering the necessary outcomes.

The Albanese government's lack of investment in residential aged care has been laid bare. Residential aged care supply increased by just 578 beds in 2024-25, less than one-tenth of the 10,600 additional places needed per year to meet demand as projected by the department. The Boxwell & Co analysis confirms that Australia's aged-care supply crisis has reached a critical tipping point, with occupancy levels hitting 94.4 per cent and full capacity projected within three years. Three states—New South Wales, WA and Tasmania—have had no growth at all; in fact, they went backwards. They have had a net decrease in aged-care beds thanks to Labor.

Already, the failure of the Albanese government to open new beds is leaving elderly people stranded in hospitals when they should be recuperating and staying in an aged-care bed. The state and territory leaders held an emergency meeting last week on aged-care beds and hospitals. The Queensland and Tasmanian premiers specifically issued statements calling on the federal government to rescue older Australians left occupying hospital beds instead of being in aged care. The Queensland health minister, Tim Nicholls, said some patients were waiting 250 to 280 days in hospital with one patient staying in hospital for more than 400 days. Elderly South Australians experience the longest wait times nationally, 253 days, for a Commonwealth aged-care bed, leading to equally high rates of hospital bed use. In Western Australia, a shortage of aged-care beds is leaving about 300 older patients stranded in WA hospitals daily, occupying beds necessary for acute care. In Victoria, there are 246 older patients stuck in state hospitals. New South Wales health minister Ryan Park said, 'The number of patients waiting for placements has surged by over 60 per cent in the past year leading to mounting human and system costs and an immediate reduction in available acute beds.'

Urgent action is needed to protect older Australians who are being failed by Labor's incompetence. Only five per cent of the required new aged-care beds were provided last financial year, leaving 238,000 older Australians waiting for home-care support. We shouldn't have elderly Australians languishing in hospital beds with nowhere to go. The Prime Minister promised to put the care into aged care, but instead we have a crisis that is crippling our hospital systems, failing some of the most vulnerable people in our community and forcing the states and territories to deal with the fallout. Elderly Australians across our cities and regions deserve much better than this. Elderly Australians, particularly in regional areas, have been let down with delays to home-care packages. Thanks to coalition pressure, some of those aged-care packages—not all, but at least some of them—were released earlier. It took a lot of advocacy on our part to make that happen.

Our elderly Australians deserve to age in the communities that they built. They deserve dignity. They deserve comfort, like the elderly residents at the aged-care facility called Ottrey Homes in Cobram, on the Murray River in my electorate, which I visited last week. Those elderly Australians built that community of Cobram. They built the shops, the orchards and the dairy companies. They taught at the schools. They worked in the local businesses. As they age, they have the right to age in place and to take deserved advantage of the community and the society that they have helped to create. We've got to make sure that, as a country, we look after these elderly Australians. All of the statistics and all of the facts that I've just outlined indicate that they are not being looked after. The Albanese government has got to stop with the rhetoric, get on with some action and make sure more aged-care beds are made available for elderly Australians so that they're not languishing in hospitals when they should be in aged-care facilities.

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