David Pocock (ACT, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate take note of the answer given by the Minister for the National Disability Insurance Scheme (Senator McAllister) to a question without notice I asked today relating to aged-care services.

This government gets very sensitive when the crossbench and others talk about how secretive it is. When you look at the raw numbers on OPDs and on compliance with FOIs, it's a secretive government. Yet we should just take them at their word when they say that releasing a report into waiting times in aged care during the budget lock-up is just a coincidence and that that was the soonest that they could possibly release it. They got it on 28 April, and on 12 May they decided: 'It's inconvenient that it's budget lock-up, but now is the first time we could do it.' Australians aren't buying that, and I don't think anyone in the Senate actually believes it. We saw the same thing with the response to the Murphy report: put it out during budget lock-up, when there's far less scrutiny.

I have some concerns, and I would love the minister to clarify them. The minister said that there were 94,963 waiting for a package and 103,527 waiting for an assessment, but the department, in estimates, said that, for the same date, 31 December, there were 131,366 people waiting for a package and the same number of people as the minister said waiting for an assessment. That's a difference of 36,000 people. That's a lot of older Australians. I'd be really interested to know why there's a discrepancy between what the minister said in the Senate and what the department told us that estimates.

But I think the bigger question is: why is it so hard to find out how many old Australians are waiting? Everyone knows that there's a challenge in aged care with assessments for Support at Home. There should be transparency. Surely, it shouldn't be so hard to get the figures. Why are there no additional home-care packages in this budget? I was so surprised that I had to call the department in lock-up to clarify. I got on the phone and said, 'Hey, I'm just looking at the budget papers; are there additional packages?' No. Ten thousand have simply been brought forward. There are no additional packages. It's really disingenuous to say that there are additional packages when there aren't—when the department says there aren't. There's a difference in figures from the department, and there's a difference in message from the department than we get in the Senate. (Time expired)

Question agreed to.