Dave Sharma (NSW, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Competition, Charities and Treasury) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate take note of the answers given by ministers to questions without notice asked by Opposition senators today.

I'm not going to get into the bedroom tax; I think my colleagues will do that topic more justice than I can; my comedic timing is not as good as theirs! I want to touch on, particularly, the question asked by Senator Blyth and answered by Senator McAllister about the availability of aged-care packages and the amount of time people are waiting. Mindful of the President's ruling about the use of language, I'm not going to quote the Prime Minister directly from his statement at the Bush Summit in Ballarat on Friday, but he quite clearly told the audience there that he was 'not going to mislead people', to use a euphemism here. This is a situation where the government has continually been uneconomical with the truth and has not levelled with the Australian people about the availability of aged-care packages.

This is the Prime Minister back in March 2021. He said

We cannot be satisfied with a situation where older Australians are dying while waiting for their homecare packages.

But my colleague Senator Blyth just recounted an episode—and this is happening across the country, across all electorates, and senators and lower house MPs are hearing this from their communities—a contact that one of her colleagues had had from a Michael from Western Australia whose mother had been approved for a level 4 package back in November. Sadly, she passed away in March, having not received a package at all. The figures here are quite startling. This isn't an isolated case. We've got about 88,000 Australians who've been assessed as eligible for a home-care package but who are still waiting to receive that package. On top of that, we've got about 121,000 Australians who are still waiting to be assessed for a home-care package. That's some 200,000 Australians, a not insignificant number, a pretty large proportion of whom are elderly or needy who are waiting to be assessed for a home-care package or who have been assessed and are waiting to receive it.

The evidence suggests that, even once they've been assessed as eligible for a home-care package, people are waiting up to 15 months to access that service. Bear in mind that these are people in their 70s, 80s and sometimes 90s. Time is quite precious to them, and their ability to live independently and with dignity at home is often highly dependent on their ability to access help. That's what these home-care packages are meant to provide. According to My Aged Care's own website, if you are assessed as medium priority the estimated time for all packages at the moment is nine to 12 months—that is, once you've been assessed as eligible you're waiting at least another nine to 12 months. So it's not uncommon for people now to be spending up to two years from when they first expressed an interest in receiving a home-care package to when they actually receive some sort of support from the government

When the coalition was in government, once you were assessed as eligible, three to six months was the average wait time before you received it. I know this personally. My father was assessed as eligible for a home-care package. He received assistance within about three months. That was in part because the coalition delivered 123,000 additional home-care packages. But in their first term of government Labor have only released one-third as many new home-care packages—about 41,000. The result is that the waitlist for a home-care package has almost tripled in the last two years. It's gone from about 29,000 people waiting to about 87,000 people. That is also reliant on old data. We cannot get new data beyond 31 March because the government is refusing to provide data on how many people are waiting.

What's going on here is that the government has released far fewer home-care packages than the previous government. The government promised to deliver an additional 83,000 new home-care packages from 1 July. Not a single new one has been delivered. We had the relevant responsible minister Sam Rae claim last week that this was because the sector wasn't ready, but then we had sector peak bodies, providers, advocacy groups and the department all telling the Senate community affairs committee hearing last week that the sector is ready to provide that care now. I remind people that what the Prime Minister told people at Ballarat last week, last Friday, is not being honoured. People are not being levelled with here about access and availability of home-care packages. (Time expired)