Maria Kovacic (NSW, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Minister to the Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you, Senator Allman-Payne, for your words and for your work on the Senate Standing Committees on Community Affairs and on the aged-care inquiries, both in this parliamentary term and previously. I sit here shaking my head while listening to the speakers not just now but also during question time and taking note of answers. I don't know what more we need to say and do or how much more loudly we need to speak to make it very, very clear that there is a crisis in relation to this issue in this country. And, if the government would like to pretend that there is no problem here and that there is nothing to see here, then I would suggest that they have a reality check. I think one of the comments in the chamber earlier today was that there was a conflation about this problem. There is no conflation. This is real. There are some 200,000 elderly Australians waiting to either be assessed or be assigned a home-care package, and that is entirely unacceptable. The waiting time from end to end for some of these people is almost two years. They point and say—I think these were the words from Senator Ananda-Rajah; I wrote them down—'We had to rescue the sector.'