Santo Santoro (Queensland, Liberal Party, Minister for Ageing) Share this | Hansard source

As Senator Abetz says, a very generous package. Let’s go to community care. Senator McLucas suggests that we should allocate more resources to community care programs. She might like to know—and I would like to inform her and, through this question, the Senate—that, under the Howard government, the number of community aged care places increased from about 5,000 under Labor to 38,000—an 800 per cent increase. I am pleased that Senator McLucas has finally cottoned on to the importance of community care because, right up until now, she has blatantly ignored the government’s very serious involvement in and commitment to community care by engaging in her scare campaigns against the elderly and the aged. She rings journalists, trying to spin them stories about shortages in aged care places, but her figures certainly omit the tens of thousands of extra aged care places that we have provided in the community. You should be honest when you talk to people about that.

Let’s have a look at healthy ageing. Senator McLucas’s discussion paper calls for a healthy ageing program and for there to be a whole-of-government approach to it. What Senator McLucas should do is seek to familiarise herself with the Office for an Ageing Australia, which was established several years ago, which released a national strategy for an ageing Australia in 2002, and which has provided a very strong leadership in that area. (Time expired)