Mr ANTHONY (10:27 AM) —John F. Kennedy once said:

. . . ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.

After spending several decades paying taxes, older Australians are certainly entitled to reverse that proposition. It is perfectly legitimate for our senior citizens to spend their autumn years in comfort and in financial and personal dignity. Sadly, this is not the view of the Australian Labor Party, because when the Australian Labor Party were given a historic hiding at the last federal election their shameful government had been spending a bottom line of $1 million an hour more than they were raising.

Mr Slipper —How much?

Mr ANTHONY —A million dollars an hour, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

Mr Slipper —What does that total up to?

Mr ANTHONY —In Commonwealth debt it went from $30 billion to $90 billion and there was an accumulated deficit of about $10.5 billion. You would expect that they would be spending this fortune on a good cause, but no; it was not for the poor, it was not for the unemployed, it was not for the disadvantaged and it certainly was not for the elderly.

Mr Slipper —It was on their mates.

Mr ANTHONY —They were frittering it away on minority and special interest groups—their mates, and probably some of their mates in the MUA, which is their traditional power base. Proof of this can be found in the shameful ways they abrogated their duty to older Australians. In the last four years of Labor's misrule, capital funding for nursing homes decreased by over 75 per cent, in spite of the fact that we continue to have an ageing population.

They could not even plead ignorance. In 1994, Professor Bob Gregory reviewed the structure of nursing home funding arrangements. The Gregory report highlighted major deficiencies in capital works. I notice the member for Jagajaga (Ms Macklin) even refers to that in an edition of National Healthcare. She says:

Simply put, reform of aged care in this country needs to address the nursing home capital problems identified in the Gregory Report and also to ensure provision is made for the increase in the numbers of older Australians who will need care in the next twenty to thirty years—care that will include home based, hostel and nursing home care.

So the problem was identified by the previous government but of course nothing happened. Labor ignored it and slashed funding by 75 per cent.

The elderly can no longer be considered as a minority group. In 1991 there were under two million Australians over the age of 65, and almost half of them lived in the state I come from—New South Wales. If I make it past the age of 65, like the Speaker of the House—a very good Speaker, I might add—I will be part of a group of five million Australians. Already this century life expectancy has risen from 51 to 75 years for men and from 55 to 81 years for women. One in three girls who are born this year will live to the age of 100. This gives us an idea of the magnitude of the challenge that faces all of us, particularly us as legislators in this parliament.

Let us look at the issue nationally. Around the country 75,000 Australians live in hostels and 64,000 Australians are nursing home residents. In fact, only six per cent of people over the age of 65 currently live in nursing homes or hostels. However, because of the ageing population, as I have mentioned, we will be faced with a severe aged care crisis. Certainly if we were not elected this crisis would have got a lot worse. The bottom line is that, under the 13 years of stewardship by the previous government, half of the nursing home residents today live in wards of three or more people, three-quarters of nursing homes do not even meet building or design standards and 10 per cent do not even have proper fire or health regulations.

Mr Slipper —And what did the Labor Party do?

Mr ANTHONY —Absolutely nothing. That is why this government needs to increase funding dramatically and immediately, as the Gregory report said: to repair Labor's neglect, to upgrade existing facilities and to build new ones. That is what the Aged Care Amendment Bill is all about.

The Aged Care Act 1997, which began in October last year, initiated the process of reform. It is to ensure that older Australians will live in comfort and dignity. Equally important, it is to ensure that we are able to offer that comfort and dignity to a rapidly expanding aged population.

We found that the public supported the government's policy of obtaining a balance between public and private funding for aged care. This balance will see over $850 million invested in the capital stock of nursing homes over the next four years. Significantly, the $850 million is being raised without increasing taxes or using Labor's deficit tactic. Of course, that tactic amounted to nothing less than borrowing from the taxes our children will have to pay in the future.

Labor's policy, if we could call it that, would see a smaller increase over four years—they have said that in this House—and all of those funds forgone would come from taxpayers. The exact amount of Labor's commitment is a moot point. They do not even know. The figure is $500 million, according to the shadow minister, the member for Jagajaga, who recognised the problem four years ago but has obviously suffered a memory lapse since—perhaps like others members of the opposition. The Leader of the Opposition (Mr Beazley) thought that $600 million sounded better. It should be remembered that that extra $100 million represents less than four days of budget deficit in the previous government's final years of power.

However, as with any major policy change, not all parts of the coalition's Aged Care Act were accepted by the public. In my electorate of Richmond, which has one of the highest proportions of older Australians in the nation—only two other seats have a higher aged population—I spend a considerable amount of time seeking the views of my constituents. I held a number of public meetings across the electorate of Richmond with older Australians and concerned citizens as well as with the aged care industry people.

Mr Slipper —Did many turn up?

Mr ANTHONY —Many turned up. We are lucky to have a high standard of nursing homes in my electorate. I will be the first to admit that. In fact, there are over two dozen such facilities in Richmond, and I would like to acknowledge them in the House: Crowley Memorial Retirement Village; Banora Point Retirement Village; Cape Byron Estate Retirement Village; Mountain View Retirement Village; Winders Lodge Hostel; Byron Bay Nursing Home; Eloura Nursing Home; Murwillumbah Nursing Home; St Andrews Nursing Home; the Australian Orthodox Home for the Aged; Coolamon Villa; Feros Village, who recently built a facility in Bangalow; Greenhill's Lodge Retirement Village; Maranoa Retirement Village Hostel; Ex-Services and Community Care; Terranora Valley Retirement Village; Kingshaven Hostel; St Joseph's Hostel and St Martha's Hostel; Terranora Valley Nursing Home; Wommin Bay Hostel; and Amaroo Nursing Home.

While the quality of places is much less of a problem than in the cities, it is the quantity that remains a problem. It is a problem because, firstly, many beds in the public hospitals are being filled by people who should properly be in nursing homes. That is why the coalition is determined to spend more on improving the capital stock of nursing homes: to free up beds in the public hospital system. This is particularly the case in the Murwillumbah public hospital, hospitals in the Lismore region and even the reconstructed wing of the Ballina District Hospital, which has over one-quarter of its beds dedicated to a dementia wing. Whilst the dementia ward is a welcome addition and provides excellent facilities, this should be done in nursing homes.

In New South Wales alone, there are 950 cases of hospital beds being used as de facto nursing home beds, costing around $100 million a year. Surely, with the hospital queues growing ever longer under Bob Carr's state administration, one would have thought it would have been in Beazley's interests and those of the federal ALP, and even in the interests the member for Batman (Mr Martin Ferguson), to support our legislation to build more homes.

The second problem about the quantity of places in Richmond is the tyranny of distance we face in rural and regional Australia. Richmond may be the smallest National Party seat in the country; nevertheless, it is simply not good enough to tell older Australians that they may have to move 100 or 200 kilometres from their home town because successive governments have not fostered the construction of local facilities for local people. The residents, staff and management of the facilities in Richmond have told me, yes, they want reform and, yes, they accept the fairness of an element of user pays in any system, but they are concerned about the accommodation bond and residents possibly having to sell their family home.

What is a matter of record, however, is that it was the hypocrites opposite—the Australian Labor Party—who first introduced accommodation bonds in the aged care industry, specifically for hostels. These Labor bonds had none of the safeguards that we have built into this legislation. There was no consumer protection, there were no minimum assets and the family home was included in their assets test. This was introduced by the ALP government in the Paul Keating era.

So they brought in accommodation bonds and they still ran down our capital stock and they still gave us a huge budget deficit. That does not make much sense, does it? Nevertheless, and with a degree of courage that the Labor Party never showed, this government quickly went about finetuning the legislation. The result of the finetuning is the Aged Care Amendment Bill that we have here before us today.

Let us look at the amendments. It is amended in four ways. The first is to replace the proposed accommodation bond with an annual accommodation charge. Much to the chagrin of the vultures opposite, we are scrapping the accommodation bond in favour of an accommodation charge. The government has capped this charge at $12 a day, or $6 a day for assisted nursing home residents. The new charge will apply for a five-year maximum.

However, many residents will not pay this charge, including those facing financial hardship and concessional residents. In fact, under our policy, a prospective nursing home resident can have assets of up to $22,000 and still not pay any daily charge at all. This means that, once and for all, older Australians will not have to sell their family home to pay for their care—actually, they never had to in the first place—and these fees will reduce the bill to around $80 million.

But taxpayers are still putting in $2.7 billion in direct subsidies to nursing homes and hostels across the country. Indeed, for every pensioner that is in a nursing home now who pays a $21.50 daily fee, the Commonwealth still adds about another $80 to take it up to around $100 per day. So to say that there is a full user-pays element is incorrect because there is an enormous amount of taxpayers' money, of Commonwealth money, going to nursing homes and hostels which is way above the amount they actually pay. As I said, this figure represents over three-quarters of the cost of care—that is, the $2.7 billion.

The second effect of this bill is to reduce from five years to two the period of time during which a carer must have occupied a resident's home for the resident to qualify as a concessional or assisted resident. The third effect of the bill is to allow the reassessment of the resident's status when he or she moves from one facility to another. The final effect of the bill is to specify that nursing homes can only charge residents for fees provided for by the Aged Care Act 1997.

It is not often that public servants are recognised on the floor of this House. But it would be remiss of me not to speak about the government's aged care reforms and how they affect older Australians in my electorate without mentioning Tweed Centrelink's director of financial services, Ms Penny Pettigrew. Ms Pettigrew accompanied me on numerous public meetings that I held on aged care in Richmond. Her patience and skill at putting complex regulations into simple language have been of invaluable assistance to my constituents. I thank her and all those who supported and explained those reforms, which is their duty, of course, in Centrelink offices.

Finally, I turn to the future. Unlike Labor, the government is, as a matter of urgency, developing a national strategy for an ageing Australia which will consider our nation's needs in light of an ageing population. The national strategy will involve a coordinated development of public policy across all sectors and all levels of government. This policy development will be unique to Australian social policy in that it will concentrate attention on the short-, medium- and long-term needs of a specific proportion of the Australian population that we all one day will enter into.

The strategy for an ageing Australia is long overdue. Its development will be welcome news to those who for many years have called for ageing to be a specific framework in public policy. It is encouraging to see that it was this government that tackled it. It is a shame that members of the opposition supported the major thrusts of this policy—in fact, they started it with the introduction of accommodation bonds in hostels—and recognised those reforms, as was mentioned before by the member for Jagajaga, but used the most un-Australian way of scare tactics to derail some of the elements of the bill. But I certainly welcome the amendments to the Aged Care Bill in this House and look forward to their support.