Julie Collins (Franklin, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Ageing and Seniors) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

() (): [by video link] This budget racks up over a trillion dollars in debt, but it leaves far too many Australians behind. It particularly leaves behind those older Australians who are expecting the federal government to respond to its own royal commission into aged care. Critically, the very first interim recommendation for aged care was to fix the home-care packages waitlist. But what did we see last night? We saw 23,000 home-care packages. For the last two years, there have been over 100,000 older Australians, who have been approved for care, waiting for care. Sadly, what we've seen is over 30,000 older Australians die in the last three years waiting for their package without the care they need. It is an absolute tragedy, and the government should have done more. The government has had the recommendations of that royal commission interim report now for 12 months. Then, of course, we have seen the outbreak of COVID in residential aged care, to which the government has more recommendations. Those too should have been dealt with much, much earlier. What we're hearing from the government is that they want to wait until the royal commission's final report in February to act. It will be sadly far too late for far too many older Australians. (Time expired)