Sam Rae (Hawke, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Aged Care and Seniors) | Hansard source

Forgive me, Deputy Speaker, if I find today's MPI and the member for Gippsland's carry on a little hard to swallow, because here is what those opposite have chosen to do: they've walked away from the bipartisanship we built around older Australians. And this week, as this parliament prepares to take the next steps in rebuilding the very system that they hollowed out, they've decided that older Australians are worth a cheap political stunt rather than showing up to work together to work hard on supporting older Australians to rebuild the system that they rely upon. We don't accept that—we never have. Where they choose division, we choose delivery, and we've got the record to prove it. Rebuilding a system that a royal commission called a national shame doesn't happen overnight; you do it brick by brick.

So let me lay out the building blocks of the new system—everything that we've achieved in four years after that miserable decade of neglect: a new Aged Care Act, the first full rebuild of the Act since 1997 that, as of 1 November last year, wrote the rights of older Australians into law for the first time in this nation's history; stronger standards; a regulator with teeth. The very first bill that we passed in the 47th parliament was an aged-care bill. We launched Support at Home alongside the new act to replace the old Home Care Packages program, a way to make aged care a government service that will be around when the member for Gippsland needs it, when I need it, and when all of our children need it. Already, in just eight months, tens of thousands more older Australians are getting care where they actually want to be—in their own homes. Wait times are coming down in the order of months. There are an extra 83,000 packages that, as of today, have now been fully rolled out to get people care where they need it, sooner.

Once that system started in November, we did what Labor governments always do; we listened to older people's experiences, we refined, in this year's budget we invested so that no older Australian will pay a cent out of pocket for clinical care under our Support at Home program. We've delivered a package of consumer protections so people get a fair go on prices and a clear statement of exactly what they're paying for. We've digitised the hardship process so the people doing it toughest aren't drowning in paperwork to prove it. The workers—we inherited a workforce that had been told for years that it simply wasn't worth more. Carers said, 'I could get paid more working on the checkout at Aldi.' We didn't think that was acceptable, so in four years we've invested nearly $18 billion to fund the largest pay rises in the history of aged care. The average registered nurse on the award is now $28,000 better off every year, and that goes up again tomorrow. We put registered nurses back in nursing homes around the clock. We lifted care minutes. There are now millions of hours of extra care being delivered to older Australians that simply weren't there before. We know that when we value our workers, when we pay them what they're worth and when we support them to have long careers in the sector, older Australians get better aged care.

We've invested in the buildings. This is where years of underinvestment has a particularly long tail. It takes anywhere from five to seven years from inception to delivery of a new aged-care home, so to say we're still playing catch up would be an understatement. But we're ambitious about moving towards delivering the 10,000 new aged-care beds this country needs every year to keep pace with our growing population, so we've invested more than $1 billion through the Aged Care Capital Assistance program—more aged-care infrastructure investment than any government in our nation's history. That means new homes, new beds in the communities that need them most. We're making aged care work for every Australian. This week, the government will move to establish Australia's first permanent Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander aged-care commissioner—a dedicated, independent voice for First Nations elders built into the architecture of the system to ensure that they are central to the care that they receive.

We're not finished. Next year, this Labor government will invest $47 billion in aged care, the single largest aged-care investment this country has ever made, and it will keep going up every year after that. Those opposite are stopping at nothing to frighten older Australians about how that gets paid for. Every dollar we ask for through the changes to the private health insurance arrangements for older Australians goes straight back into the aged-care system—every single cent—so that, when an older Australian needs aged care, it's there for them. That's the deal we've made. We're reinvesting in the care people will genuinely need rather than leaving them to find it in the system the royal commission called 'neglect'.

Let me put it as plainly as I can. They had the road map, and they did the minimum. We got the report, and we got to work. They bring a motion. We bring a record. This side of the House does not treat older Australians as a political football. We don't do division; we do delivery. And we'll keep doing it brick by brick for as long as it takes to get the right care for every older Australian.

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