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

I thank the member for her question, for her deep interest in aged-care issues, in particular, and for her engagement with me and with other aged-care ministers over the course of her time in government. As you know, there's been quite a deep public discussion about the issue of longer-stay older patients in public hospitals across the country, perhaps with the exception of Victoria, where there's a pretty strong state-run nursing home system that takes a lot of those patients more directly.

But there's no question—the increase in longer-stay older patients across the rest of the country is quite significant and, frankly, tracks the increase we are seeing in the number of very old Australians as a result of the ageing of the baby boomer population. This is increasing demand for residential aged care and it is increasing pressure, by extension, on our hospital system.

From the first term of the Albanese government, we have undertaken arrangements with different state governments to fund programs to divert older Australians from hospitals in the first place; they include, in South Australia, geriatric outreach teams that go out to aged-care facilities to try to prevent admission in the first place. Those are working very, very well. They're the subject of Commonwealth funding.

We're also trying to ensure, as far as possible, that people are able to leave a hospital if they are medically able to do so. That, ultimately, in some cases, depends on there being a residential aged-care bed available to them, and we know there is a shortage of residential aged-care beds right across the system. That is why we put so much energy, particularly under the former minister for aged care, into designing a new aged-care system that would stimulate new investment—investment that had fallen off a cliff, frankly, over the period leading into and certainly during the COVID pandemic.

Now, we are still engaged with state governments about that. It is a significant part of the negotiations that remain underway between the Commonwealth and all state and territory governments for a new five-year hospital funding agreement. Quite explicitly, a part of that negotiation has been to continue, and maybe extend and expand, arrangements, including Commonwealth funding for longer-stay older patients, as I said, to try to avoid them having to go to hospital in the first place and, if they do end up in hospital, to have a smooth transition out of hospital into an alternative place, whether that's at home with a home-care package or into a residential aged-care facility. Those negotiations are ongoing. We hope to strike a deal, particularly before the South Australian government goes into caretaker mode. If we're not able to do that, we start to get right up against the end of this financial year, given we only have a one-year agreement so far, and this will be a big part of those negotiations going forward.

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