Senate debates

Thursday, 14 November 2019

Questions without Notice

Aged Care

2:53 pm

Photo of Richard ColbeckRichard Colbeck (Tasmania, Liberal Party, Minister for Aged Care and Senior Australians) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the senator for the question. As I've said a number of times in the chamber, the reason that we've invested $2.2 billion into home care packages since last year's budget is that we had to continue to grow the capacity of the system. That's why we grew the number of aged-care packages by 25,000—25 per cent in the last financial year. We saw, for the first time, a fall in the waiting lists, which is what Australians were looking to see. That's why we called the royal commission—so that a forensic review of this industry would be undertaken and so that, when we designed policy going forward, it would be fit for purpose and not, as the aged-care royal commission has described, a series of add-ons over a period of time.

We take this extremely seriously. We want older Australians to be able to get the care that they need when they need it. We understand that there's further investment required coming off the back of the royal commission, which is why the government has announced that it will make additional investment in the system. But what we will also do is make sure the system works properly. We're not going to create another VET FEE-HELP. We're not going to create another pink batts exercise where the market grows so rapidly that we get shonky operators in there, and the royal commission report actually warned us against doing that. So what we will do is: we will take the appropriate policy development process, we will consider this matter carefully and we will inject—

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