Amanda Stoker (Queensland, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

In their craven attempts to provide political cover for the Premier of Victoria and his epic fails to manage the COVID-19 virus, they seem to ignore the comparative performance of the Australian aged-care population on this measure. Before I was interrupted, I mentioned that the Australian rate of lives lost among the residential aged-care population is, quite sadly, 0.18 per cent. In France, it is 2.4 per cent, or over 1,300 per cent of the Australian figure. Let's go to Spain. It is 2.5 per cent there. In Ireland, it's 3.2 per cent. In Italy, it's 3.2 per cent. In Austria, it's 4.9 per cent of the residential aged-care population—1,600 per cent of the rate we have here in Australia. This is absolutely enormous. When we compare the fact that in the United Kingdom 16,598 older people who are residents of residential aged care have passed away—5.3 per cent of their entire aged-care residential population, which is 3,000 per cent of the Australian figure—it's a little bit rich for those people opposite to be playing this flip-flopping game where they say, 'There's not enough funding,' and then they say, 'That announcement's not real funding; that's just reannouncing old measures.' What we have in place here is a plan, devised in January and implemented in the months following, for which funding has been the subject of an announcement of an enormous extension today to show that we are committed to managing this difficult situation as best as it possibly can be to protect Australia's older people. It's very easy for those opposite to have an awfully short memory. When we came to government how much was the budget for aged care? It was $13 billion. When we go to the year just completed the funding for aged care in this country was $22 billion. It will continue to grow to $23 billion, $24 billion and $25 billion for each year of the forward estimates. Aged-care funding in this country is increasing by over a billion dollars every year. That's not just inflation, those are significant investments in our aging population and continual improvements of the standard of care that Australian families can expect when they come to depend upon residential aged care to help them through some of the most difficult times of life.

Since the 2018-19 budget this government has invested $3 billion into home-care packages to support more Australians living in their homes for longer. We've released 14,275 new residential aged-care places. We're investing $5.3 billion from 1 July through to June 2022 for existing Commonwealth Home Support Program service providers, so that they have got continuity of service for the 840,000 people they assist across Australia. We've invested $21.9 million for the cost of operating My Aged Care. We've provided $320 million in a boost for residential care subsidies. We've given providers almost $50 million for a business improvement fund to assist them through financial difficulty, to prioritise helping them get the assistance they need to run those operations well in a long-term, viable way. And, of course, we're helping with some of the unique challenges that come with operating a residential aged-care service in rural, regional and remote areas of Australia.

There's an ongoing 30 per cent increase to the viability supplement to support services that operate in rural and regional Australia. I can tell you, there are unique challenges that operate in rural and regional Australia for the provision of aged care. An example I can give you is this: most of the time in order to be viable an aged-care centre needs to have a certain number of residents to get the economies of scale—to use a somewhat crass term—needed to make it economical to be able to provide a high level of care to all of those people who are residents. But in a place like Dalby, for instance, where there is an outstanding aged-care centre being run by the local Rotarians, with the assistance of council, the smaller population of that town means that the per head cost is much higher. The local community pitches in to make sure the service can stay in the local area, because it is important to keep families connected to one another. This government recognises those challenges by providing additional funding through the special funds to acknowledge some of the financial challenges that come from operating a service of this kind in rural and regional areas, because we understand that it's important to keep families together. The Dalby aged-care service is an outstanding quality aged-care residential home, with cheerful residents living a good life in a beautiful country environment. Those are the kinds of services we are supporting all around the country, and so we will not be lectured to by those opposite who underperformed persistently during their time in government. We stand by senior Australians through the toughest days of their lives.