Kate Thwaites (Jagajaga, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Older Australians deserve better than this government. They deserve a government that's committed to fixing our broken aged-care system. Instead they've got a government that is still failing to act on the recommendations of the royal commission into aged care, failing to ensure that extra money that's put into the system is going to improving the food and nutrition of elderly residents and not just ending up in the pockets of unscrupulous providers, failing to ensure there is a nurse on duty 24 hours a day in residential aged care and failing to improve the wages and conditions for workers on the frontline—the aged-care workers who care for older of people and who desperately need a pay rise.

People in my electorate got a very sobering experience of what the Morrison government's eight years of neglect of our aged-care system looks like during the height of the pandemic last year when local aged-care residents died and others were put at risk because of this government's failures. You would think that the government would have learnt from these mistakes and would now be doing everything it can to protect people in aged care. Yet I know of one local facility where residents were promised vaccines in February but in the end they only received them just last week. That's a five month wait. How lucky is this government that there wasn't a significant outbreak in that time? Because that's all that was protecting those residents in that aged-care home in that time. This government has failed to look after older people and it is failing to do its job.