This article is more than 10 months old

This article is more than 10 months old

Labor has launched a new campaign targeting the government over aged care funding, as the health minister, Greg Hunt, commits to delivering a “significant package” for the sector before Christmas.

Setting a deadline of 11 November when parliament returns, opposition leader Anthony Albanese said the “aged care, action now” campaign would gather signatures from across the country calling for immediate funding to address a crisis in the sector.

“It’s not good enough for the government to be sitting on its hands while these cuts have been made, while even the money that was allocated hasn’t been spent,” Albanese said.

“The truth is that this government has cut aged care funding, they slashed it while Scott Morrison was the treasurer of Australia. And the consequences are there for all to see.”

The new campaign comes after the royal commission into aged care released a scathing report into the sector on Thursday, calling for urgent funding for home care packages, action on chemical restraints used in nursing homes and the removal of disabled young people from aged care.

Albanese said the report had highlighted “atrocious” behaviour towards older Australians, and the government had been missing in action since the report was handed down on Thursday.

While the minister for aged care, Richard Colbeck, faced criticism for refusing to commit extra funds to the overburdened system following the report’s public released, Hunt on Sunday defended the government’s response.

He said the report went “further than we expected” and the Coalition would now consider and respond to the commission’s interim findings.



“We are responding to what is the most profound and serious review of aged care in Australia, in the commission’s words, in four decades,” Hunt told ABC’s Insiders program on Sunday.

“We called this [royal commission] because we recognised that there were deep and serious challenges. The commission went further than we expected in the sense that it identified a nationwide challenge over multiple decades. It identified both a cultural and a governmental challenge, and so, we are responding, and there will be additional home care packages.”

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When asked if he would commit to at least $2.5bn – the amount needed to address the home care wait list of 120,000 – Hunt said he would not pre-empt the figure.

The inquiry pointed to 16,000 people who died last year while waiting for a home care package, with those needing the highest level of care waiting an average 22 months.

Labor’s shadow minister for aged care, Julie Collins, said that for every week that the government delayed action, 300 older Australians die without their home care package.

“It is simply not good enough for the prime minister and minister Hunt to say, ‘Oh, wait, we will do something in a few weeks’,” Collins said.

“Older Australians sitting in that queue don’t have weeks – the government must respond urgently. That’s what our campaign is about.”

Hunt pointed to a decision made at Friday’s council of Australian governments health council meeting to make medicine safety a new national priority as an example of the government responding “in real time” to concerns raised by the commission about the use of chemical restraints.

The Coag resolution was an agreement to establish a baseline report on medicine use and safety to identify the prevalence of harm and misuse of medicines.

Hunt said the government would be taking “stronger action” on the use of chemical restraints in response to the commission’s findings, but would not detail what changes were under consideration.

“We will be dealing with chemical restraints as one of the three priorities that they’ve identified for a response right now,” he said.

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Hunt also said the report had raised concern about ageism in Australia, which he said was a “national cultural issue” that needed to be addressed by both government and the community.

“The big change is to deal with what the commission refers to as an ageist society, and respect, and respect is both government and communal,” Hunt said.

“This is the line in the sand, together, where we change the way that Australians deal with ageing in what is, by definition, an ageing society.”

In response to a major report from the productivity commission this week on mental health, Hunt said the government’s “objective” was to build 100 adult mental health clinics over the next decade, with eight already under way costing $60m.

But he said one of the biggest barriers to treatment was “self stigma”.