Mr ALBANESE (9:41 AM) —The minister certainly does have a hide coming into the House and complaining about the timing of the Aged Care Amendment (Omnibus) Bill 1999 . The whole bill is necessary because of the mess that the government made of its so-called aged care reforms which were introduced in the 1996-97 budget. If you want to know what has gone wrong with aged care in this country, you have simply to look at the bill and go through the provisions, because each of the provisions is there to fix the government's mistakes through its mishandling of aged care.

The biggest element of all of that is that the government's problems came about because they cut $0.5 billion out of aged care in their first budget, at the time that they were talking about reform. That was a so-called reform which did nothing to benefit older Australians and did everything to benefit the government's friends in the industry. The requested amendments that are coming back from the Senate are the government amendments that are required because the bill was not passed by 30 June 1999; but you have to look at why that was not the case.

We even have the extraordinary suggestion by the minister that somehow the Australian Labor Party did something wrong because we moved amendments. It is an interesting view of parliamentary scrutiny and democracy in this country when we have a minister who is prepared to go to the box in the House of Representatives and say that the opposition dared to move amendments to try and make the Aged Care Amendment (Omnibus) Bill 1999 a more satisfactory bill.

You have to look at the whole timetable of what this government did. In 1996-97, we saw the reforms introduced. For day after day in this chamber, the former ministers—the member for Pearce, Judi Moylan, and the member for Bass, Warwick Smith—said that there were no problems. They said that aged care reform was going well. But, after much agitation and campaigning from elderly Australians themselves, and with leadership shown by the then shadow minister, the member for Jagajaga, we finally saw on 5 March 1998 an aged care amendment bill come in to try and fix some of these problems. The second reading speech was given in the Senate on 26 March 1998, and then the bill simply disappeared. The government chose not to pursue it—because to pursue it in the lead-up to the October 1998 election would have been to acknowledge the mess, the difficulties and the confusion that were being created by the government's reforms. So they put political expediency before good public policy by not pursuing those changes prior to the last election.

They had a number of other changes as well at that time, one of which was the problem of the move to coalescence. As 1 July 1998 was approaching, it appeared that there needed to be a response there, and the government announced that the Productivity Commission would have an inquiry which was to report to the government by 13 January 1999. The commission report was finally made public on 31 March 1999, but we still did not see, in a whole range of areas, any real move by the government to pursue change. This bill was tabled in the House only on 10 June 1999. It was debated only in this chamber—the opposition at the time had not even had time to consider the bill in appropriate detail and to move amendments here. That is why we had to move them in the Senate, and we foreshadowed that at the time. There is no surprise in that. (Time expired)

Mr SPEAKER —The question is that the requested amendments be made.

Question resolved in the affirmative.

Mr Albanese —Mr Speaker—

Mr SPEAKER —I have put the question. If I have failed to recognise the member for Grayndler, I apologise to him. There was no intent to do that. In fact I did the normal thing and looked for someone to rise on the other side. I have now put the question. There is no opportunity for the member for Grayndler to continue because the question has been put and passed.