MATTERS OF PUBLIC IMPORTANCE
Mrs ELLIOT (Richmond) (16:01): I'm very pleased to rise on this matter of public importance. I, like others on our side, do find it very bizarre that the opposition have put this forward because we all remember when the Liberals and Nationals were in government. We all remember the extent of all their cuts— An honourable member interjecting— Mrs ELLIOT: Yes, that's exactly right.
Whether it was aged care or health, no matter what it was, right across the board—there were cuts to pensions. But I'll detail that a bit later on. What I want to talk about is what we on the Labor side think about our older Australians and why we're very proud to deliver for them.
Let's always remember that these are the people who built our nation. They worked hard, paid their taxes and raised their kids, and that's at the heart of everything we do to deliver for them. Of course, our funding increases and assistance to older Australians are quite extensive, whether it's lowering cost-of-living pressures, or expanding healthcare access or aged-care access, they're all major areas we've invested in.
Let's look at health care first. We strengthened bulk-billing right across the board by increasing—tripling—the bulk-billing incentive. So many older people can actually access a bulk-billing doctor now, and they couldn't do that before.
Cheaper scripts have made such a huge difference to all the general population by capping it at $25, and we've also frozen it at $7.70 for pensioners and concession card holders. Urgent care clinics are amazing. I know so many older people in my electorate.
It has made a huge difference for the health care that they need. We know, obviously, that older people do need to access health care more. We continue to deliver for them.
We've also got workforce incentives and other cost-of-living relief measures. Commonwealth rent assistance is 40 per cent higher than when we first came into government. That assists so many older Australians.
Our deeming rate adjustments, our energy bill rebates and, of course, all of our reforms to aged care which have made such a huge difference, as well as our indexing of the pension. As we know, we are really getting on with the job of delivering once-in-a-generation reforms to deliver high-quality aged-care services to older Australians. Let's look at the record of the Liberals and Nationals.
They did establish the royal commission into aged care, and the interim report, tabled October 2019 just needed one word for the cover. What was that word? Neglect.
That really summarised their time in government when it came to aged care. In the commission's own words: 'The coalition left behind an underpaid, undervalued and insufficiently trained workforce.' That's what we inherited as a government. We're investing $47 billion in aged care, the largest investment in our nation's history, and those investments are right across the board for residential care, for Support at Home and for the workforce, with nearly $18 billion to fund the largest pay increase in the history of aged care.
All we saw were cuts from them. Let's turn back the clock and go over some of the cuts they had. We all remember before the 2013 election.
They were then crowing that, if they got into government, there'd be no cuts to education, no cuts to health and no changes to pensions. What's the first thing they did? It was to cut all of it.
These cuts were horrific. In 2014, they tried to introduce a GP tax. I know many older Australians in my area remember that.
They cut $57 billion from hospitals, they tried to cut pension indexation, and they tried to increase the pension age to 70. Always remember that the Liberals and Nationals teamed up with the Greens and cut the pension for over 370,000 pensioners. I can tell you, every one of those people in my electorate remembers what they did with them.
We know how devastating that was. We also know what the Liberals and Nationals want to do. They talked about it a bit.
They want to bring back the cashless debit card. What an impact that'll have on pensioners! That still worries people in my electorate.
They know that they want to bring it back, and we know what that means. It means 80 per cent of their pension payment would be put on a privatised cashless card. They had it in government before.
They wanted to expand it to pensioners. We got in, and we got rid of it. I know that pensioners were very worried when they talked about doing that.
Of course, it's not just the Liberals and Nationals that people in my electorate are concerned about; they're equally concerned about the other conservative party, One Nation. We know now that they're just a sort of conglomeration of three parties all trying to outdo one another. We know when we look at One Nation's policies that they want to have cuts to the PBS.
How devastating would that be for our older Australians? We also know One Nation MPs have voted 15 times to cut or freeze the aged pension. They've also voted many times to make GP and specialist visits more expensive.
All we can say when we look across there at the Liberals, Nationals and One Nation is: what are they going to do? They're going to make cuts to health, aged care and pensions. The Greens helped them to do that as well, so you can't trust them on that.
But this is a fact. Conservative governments and conservative parties make cuts that hurt older Australians. We've seen it time and time again.
It's only Labor that continues to deliver for our older Australians, whether it's health, aged care or pensions, because we will always stand with our older Australians. (Time expired)