MATTERS OF PUBLIC IMPORTANCE
Mr RAE (Hawke—Minister for Aged Care and Seniors) (15:36): Listening to the member for Gippsland, it strikes me just how far this parliament has drifted from where it used to be. There was a time, and it wasn't so long ago, when aged care and looking after seniors across our community wasn't a contest in this chamber. We were working on this together.
The royal commission into aged care was established by a coalition government. It was backed right across this parliament, by both sides of this House, and, as it reported its findings, nobody in this place stood up to defend the system as it was. The new Aged Care Act was passed with bipartisan support.
It was a commitment that we would work together, knowing the urgency and the importance of this task—to deliver better outcomes for the people who have built our communities. We agreed, all of us collectively, that we had let older Australians down. We agreed it could never be allowed to happen again.
But, if those opposite want to talk about failing older Australians, let's talk about what that same royal commission found on their record. There were three volumes in its interim report. The commissioners needed only one word for the cover: Neglect.
It was a system that, in their words, diminished Australia as a nation. Older Australians were left in pain, left alone and left waiting for care that never came. Commissioner Lynelle Briggs put the cause of it beyond doubt.
She said that the coalition government's main consideration was 'the minimum commitment it could get away with, rather than what should be done to sustain the aged-care system'. The minimum they could get away with—that's an independent royal commission's verdict on those opposite being in office for a decade. It's the reason that the mountain we have to climb to deliver better outcomes for older people is so very steep.
I note that the member for Gippsland was a minister in that government— Mr Chester: Why don't you answer your letters? Mr RAE: It was within his power every single day to stand up for older Australians across all of our communities and demand that his government did better— Mr Chester: Why won't you respond to a letter? Come on, show bag!
Mr RAE: before we got to a point where a royal commission accused him and his colleagues of systematic neglect. The DEPUTY SPEAKER ( Ms Claydon ): Member for Gippsland, everyone showed you respect during your 10 minutes. I want you to apply the same level of respect back.
The cross-table interjections are very unhelpful. You have all got an opportunity to contribute to this debate and express your opinions during that. The minister has the floor, and I'd like to hear him uninterrupted, please.
Mr RAE: Since the royal commission, the member for Gippsland has been party to the bipartisanship of these generational reforms that we're seeking to implement, but now, wracked with the desperation of facing their own political senescence, they are crab-walking away from this bipartisan reform program. I'm thankful for small things, and at least at least the member for Gippsland has recently—but very recently—found some sort of part-time moral courage when he comes to this chamber on these important matters.
But I stress how recent it is and how very part time it is. Mr Chester interjecting— The DEPUTY SPEAKER: The member for Gippsland! I will not repeat what you are just uttering across the chamber, but I don't want to hear it again.
I think you know very well what I'm talking about, and if I hear it again, you'll be leaving the chamber. The minister has the call. Mr RAE: Forgive me, Deputy Speaker, if I find today's MPI and the member for Gippsland's carry on a little hard to swallow, because here is what those opposite have chosen to do: they've walked away from the bipartisanship we built around older Australians.
And this week, as this parliament prepares to take the next steps in rebuilding the very system that they hollowed out, they've decided that older Australians are worth a cheap political stunt rather than showing up to work together to work hard on supporting older Australians to rebuild the system that they rely upon. We don't accept that—we never have. Where they choose division, we choose delivery, and we've got the record to prove it.
Rebuilding a system that a royal commission called a national shame doesn't happen overnight; you do it brick by brick. So let me lay out the building blocks of the new system—everything that we've achieved in four years after that miserable decade of neglect: a new Aged Care Act, the first full rebuild of the Act since 1997 that, as of 1 November last year, wrote the rights of older Australians into law for the first time in this nation's history; stronger standards; a regulator with teeth.
The very first bill that we passed in the 47th parliament was an aged-care bill. We launched Support at Home alongside the new act to replace the old Home Care Packages program, a way to make aged care a government service that will be around when the member for Gippsland needs it, when I need it, and when all of our children need it. Already, in just eight months, tens of thousands more older Australians are getting care where they actually want to be—in their own homes.
Wait times are coming down in the order of months. There are an extra 83,000 packages that, as of today, have now been fully rolled out to get people care where they need it, sooner. Once that system started in November, we did what Labor governments always do; we listened to older people's experiences, we refined, in this year's budget we invested so that no older Australian will pay a cent out of pocket for clinical care under our Support at Home program.
We've delivered a package of consumer protections so people get a fair go on prices and a clear statement of exactly what they're paying for. We've digitised the hardship process so the people doing it toughest aren't drowning in paperwork to prove it. The workers—we inherited a workforce that had been told for years that it simply wasn't worth more.
Carers said, 'I could get paid more working on the checkout at Aldi.' We didn't think that was acceptable, so in four years we've invested nearly $18 billion to fund the largest pay rises in the history of aged care. The average registered nurse on the award is now $28,000 better off every year, and that goes up again tomorrow. We put registered nurses back in nursing homes around the clock.
We lifted care minutes. There are now millions of hours of extra care being delivered to older Australians that simply weren't there before. We know that when we value our workers, when we pay them what they're worth and when we support them to have long careers in the sector, older Australians get better aged care.
We've invested in the buildings. This is where years of underinvestment has a particularly long tail. It takes anywhere from five to seven years from inception to delivery of a new aged-care home, so to say we're still playing catch up would be an understatement.
But we're ambitious about moving towards delivering the 10,000 new aged-care beds this country needs every year to keep pace with our growing population, so we've invested more than $1 billion through the Aged Care Capital Assistance program—more aged-care infrastructure investment than any government in our nation's history. That means new homes, new beds in the communities that need them most.
We're making aged care work for every Australian. This week, the government will move to establish Australia's first permanent Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander aged-care commissioner—a dedicated, independent voice for First Nations elders built into the architecture of the system to ensure that they are central to the care that they receive. We're not finished.
Next year, this Labor government will invest $47 billion in aged care, the single largest aged-care investment this country has ever made, and it will keep going up every year after that. Those opposite are stopping at nothing to frighten older Australians about how that gets paid for. Every dollar we ask for through the changes to the private health insurance arrangements for older Australians goes straight back into the aged-care system—every single cent—so that, when an older Australian needs aged care, it's there for them.
That's the deal we've made. We're reinvesting in the care people will genuinely need rather than leaving them to find it in the system the royal commission called 'neglect'. Let me put it as plainly as I can.
They had the road map, and they did the minimum. We got the report, and we got to work. They bring a motion.
We bring a record. This side of the House does not treat older Australians as a political football. We don't do division; we do delivery.
And we'll keep doing it brick by brick for as long as it takes to get the right care for every older Australian.