Rebekha Sharkie (Mayo, Centre Alliance) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is for the Minister for Aged Care and Seniors. Every Mayo home-care provider that I've researched is lifting its fees on Saturday, by 40 per cent to 100 per cent. One provider is charging non-grandfathered self-funded retirees and part-pensioners a co-payment of up to $132 per hour for meal preparation and up to $101 per hour for showering on a Saturday. Most older Australians can't afford this. Will you please look at price capping and bringing it forward?

Sam Rae (Hawke, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Aged Care and Seniors) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Mayo for her question and her ongoing commitment to ensuring that older people in her community do get safe, dignified and high-quality aged care. Of course, from Saturday, with bipartisan support, we herald the arrival of the new Support at Home program, which is a new generation of aged care for every single older person across Australia, and it's to this program that the member's question pertains. From Saturday, we will ensure that administration prices under the home-care program are capped. They have previously been exorbitantly charged by some providers—not all providers but some providers—so caps will come into place at 10 per cent around most administration fees. We want the money that is afforded to older people for their care to be used for their care, not for administrative purposes.

We also have the independent pricing authority having issued pricing guidance to both consumers and providers—a better level of transparency and understanding for the entire sector around what appropriate pricing for services looks like. And, from July 2026, the independent pricing authority will, of course, introduce the pricing caps to ensure that no older person is inappropriately charged for the services.

Of course, we have to understand the road that we have trodden to get to this point. We had a royal commission which uncovered extraordinarily distressing stories of mistreatment of older people. Its report was mononymously named Neglect. For nine long years, those opposite, including the Leader of the Opposition in her position as health minister, neglected older people across our country, and finally Labor has come to the plate to ensure that every single older Australian can be afforded the safe, dignified and high-quality aged care that those opposite should have done a long time ago.