Shayne Neumann (Blair, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Minister for Health and Ageing. How is the Albanese Labor government delivering generational reforms to aged care after a decade of cuts and neglect?

Mark Butler (Hindmarsh, Australian Labor Party, Deputy Leader of the House) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Blair. He knows aged care well, having held the portfolio for Labor for a number of years. He knows that we, on this side of the House, over the last few years, have had no higher priority than strengthening Medicare and strengthening aged care, because aged care when we came to government was in the worst state it had been in in the more than 30 years that I had been working with that sector—tragically summed up by the royal commission in one word, the title to their interim report, which was 'neglect'.

We were utterly determined to turn that around. I don't think there was a single policy area where we made decisions to invest more money in the last term than in aged care, to deliver RNs 24/7—registered nurses on shift all the time. They said it couldn't be done, and we've delivered it. We've delivered more care minutes to every aged-care resident, delivered better wages to aged-care workers to allow providers to recruit and retain the workers we need to provide better food in aged-care facilities—

Alison Penfold (Lyne, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It takes 10 months to get a visa.

Mark Butler (Hindmarsh, Australian Labor Party, Deputy Leader of the House) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

and provided more home-care packages.

In the 2023 budget we did it. In the 2024 budget we did it. In 2024 MYEFO we did it, with thousands more home-care packages as well as the 83,000 new Support at Home care packages, which I think I said yesterday were in the 2025 budget. Actually, they were even earlier, in the 2024 MYEFO, to be rolled out over the course of 2025-26. The pace of reform has been unprecedented, and the need for it has been acute.

Milton Dick (Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Order! The member for Lyne! We're going to pause. I can't hear the minister because the member for Lyne is continually interjecting. No more interjections from the member for Lyne, because I want to hear what the minister is saying.

Mark Butler (Hindmarsh, Australian Labor Party, Deputy Leader of the House) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Those opposite did worse than nothing. In 2012, we set up a rolling process of reforms that I agreed with Mr Dutton, which would get this sector ready for the ageing of the baby boomer generation—a rolling series of reforms that was derailed in the middle of the last decade. I wonder who the minister was when that was all derailed. I wonder who the minister was who failed to deliver the mid-decade reform that was set out in that 2012 piece of legislation that I agreed with Mr Dutton. I wonder who the minister was who, in her entire tenure, did not deliver a single additional home-care package—a big fat doughnut. I wonder who the minister was who cut aged-care funding to the residential sector not once but twice in her relatively short tenure as aged-care minister—$1.2 billion in the 2016 budget and half a billion dollars in the 2015 MYEFO. I wonder who that was! I have appreciated the dialogue we had with Senator Ruston last year and to deliver the deal that will get this legislation through this week. (Time expired)