Sally Sitou (Reid, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

OU () (): My question is to the Prime Minister. How is the Albanese Labor government working to restore dignity to the aged-care sector?

Anthony Albanese (Grayndler, Australian Labor Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Reid for her question and for her concern for the people just a little bit further west than me, in her electorate of Reid, and particularly the elderly people in that fine electorate. There are a range of aged-care facilities—in Burwood, in Concord, in Five Dock, in all of those communities, including ethnically specific aged-care centres for the Chinese community and for the Italian community and others.

After a decade of neglect and a royal commission that was titled Neglecta royal commission that they established, where they appointed the commissioners; they titled its interim report Neglectwe needed to have more carers with more time to care. It's a commitment that we took to the election, to restore dignity to aged care. I think that most Australians would think that nurses should be in nursing homes, that this was not a radical policy but a sensible commonsense policy. We said that we would get nurses back in aged care, 24/7.

Today the results are in. On average, just after this began in July, there is a registered nurse onsite 98 per cent of the time. Eighty-six per cent of facilities already have a nurse onsite 24/7 and, on average, there is a registered nurse onsite in aged-care homes, for 23½ hours a day, across the country. What that means is older Australians are getting the care that they deserve, because we changed the rules to make it happen—as well as encouraging the workforce to stay in aged care, by having the 15 per cent pay increase from 1 July, with 250,000 aged-care workers benefiting from that.

Prior to this, we had the usual scare campaigns. The member for Farrer said:

… weeks out from the Federal Election, Anthony Albanese's key promise … was to force every aged care home to have a nurse in their facility 24/7 by July this year.…   …   …

… he … sowed the seeds of the crisis that is now unfolding across the nation.

The consequences are absolutely devastating.

What is happening in aged care is that things off the back of their crisis are getting better, and these figures show that that is the case—with more funding, a better workforce, delivering on our commitments and ensuring that older Australians have the dignity and care that they deserve.