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

I take the interjection from Senator Abetz, because it was a stunt. We the government voted against that stunt because the Labor Party amendment was poorly thought out and entirely inappropriate for what was essentially legislation governing means testing for aged care. Labor, predictably, issued a media release falsely claiming the government was opposed to the idea of one spot check a year. In the media release they stated that we were opposed to one spot check per home per year. As the figures that I have just outlined indicate, not only are we committed to the idea—and, by the way, it was our idea in the first place—we are actually doing it. Not only that, we have also funded—and we are getting on with the job of—one spot check for each of the 3,000 nursing homes in Australia per year.

While the Labor Party plays cheap politics over the security and quality of aged care, the Howard government is delivering for older Australians. I remind the Senate that this is only one of a range of measures that we have funded to the tune of $100 million of new money to help protect the aged and the frail within the government funding for nursing homes within Australia.