Matt Keogh (Burt, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Defence Industry) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise today to talk about aged care and the government's response to the aged-care royal commission's interim report. The government seemed to be dragged kicking and screaming to making a response to the royal commission report after Labor had been calling on them to do just this—seemingly deciding to try and ignore what the royal commission had been saying. I want to highlight something that particularly concerns me. Frequently, I have members of our community coming into my office or contacting me for assistance because they—or, usually, their more elderly family member—have been assessed as requiring in-home aged-care support but have not been funded for that package or have been allocated a package that is of a lower funding level and it is not adequate to support them. The consequences are that those people who need that support end up going back into hospital time and time again, putting more pressure on our state public hospital systems, and it also means that they end up in aged-care facilities sooner, because they're not getting the in-home support that they need. Unfortunately, in a number of instances, I have seen members of my community pass away before they have been given the in-home aged-care assistance that they need. We know that 16,000 Australians have suffered that same fate, and, in its response to the royal commission today, the government only announced funding for an additional 10,000. Shame!