STATEMENTS BY SENATORS

Senator ALLMAN-PAYNE (Queensland) (13:46): Having to choose between a meal and a shower each day—that's what Labor's new aged-care co-payments coming in this Saturday will mean for many older Australians already scraping by on a pension. Under Labor's changes, the worse your health, the more you'll pay for care. On the government's own numbers, three in 10 full pensioners and three in four part pensioners in residential care will pay more.

In home care, new co-payments mean some older people will pay up to $50 just to get help with a shower. We've heard directly from people who are telling us that they won't be able to afford their care package anymore. Meanwhile, over 200,000 people are waiting without the care they need, often for a year or more, because of this government's policy of deliberately releasing fewer care packages than people need.

This should be unthinkable. Thousands of those people are stuck in hospital beds. They're not sick; they just need care.

Labor's minister for aged care and seniors was celebrating this week when he told the ABC, 'We're seeing profits for aged-care providers climbing for the first time in decades.' I don't think that's something to celebrate when older people are telling us that they won't be able to afford the care they need any longer. What kind of country is this if we can't even look after our parents and grandparents when they get old, where one in three big corporations can pay no tax but older Australians who have paid tax all their lives get abandoned when they need us most?

Aged care should not be for profit. We can and we must look after older people. The Greens will fight to reverse care-for-profit, to end the deliberate shortage of care and to make sure every older person in this country can get the help that they need at the time that they need it.