Anthony Albanese and Anika Wells are in Darwin making their aged care announcement which we previewed a bit earlier ($60m for 120 aged care beds) and Anika is again talking about how she made a promise to Jan, an aged care worker, last time she was in Darwin to do something about Jan’s 100 person waiting list.

Wells:

I promised Jan we would go away and do some more work and see if we could help her and today we return with $60 million worth of good news to build 120 new aged care beds here in Darwin. That will be on top of the $40 million we have already invested in building more residential aged care facilities here in Darwin this term.

What that process looks like now is we will open EOIs, we have already been talking to providers who have the kind of experience and capability to be able to deliver this facility. We have had significant interest and we’ll continue to work through that. It is part of the agenda that the Albanese Government has had for aged care this term. It was the very first bill that we put through the 47th Parliament.

We have now invested more than $35 billion in fixing the aged care crisis this term.

That looks like $17.7 billion in wage rises for our aged care workers who have long been undervalued and we need those people back in the sector and like the PM said, because he keeps a close eye on this and I appreciate his support, they are flooding back to the sector.

Not sure what that will do for the immediate waiting list, but let’s see.