Mark Butler held a doorstop to talk about the government passing it’s cheaper medicine bill and instead, as expected, faced questions on what the government was doing on aged care home packages. Here is how some of that played out:

Butler:

We’re releasing about 2,000 packages into the system every single week.
We were going to stop that at 30 June and move to an entirely new system of Support at Home, but we heard a message from providers and from importantly older people themselves that they wanted a short delay in order to ensure that they are ready for an entirely new aged care system. As part of that decision, over the period between 1 July and 1 November, which is when the new system takes effect, we’ve been putting those 2,000 packages or thereabouts into the system every single week as well.

Q: Those packages aren’t new though. They’re from people who’ve either died or moved into residential aged care. So are you ruling out supporting this push from the Coalition and Crossbench to have extra packages to help people so they don’t have to wait another eight weeks?

Butler:

We’ve been delivering additional packages, not just the packages as you say that become free because people have moved out of them for some reason. We’ve been delivering additional packages pretty much every budget or budget update. We did it again in the budget update in December, just before Christmas.

Q: I’m talking about in this period from now until –

Butler:

And we committed to a very big increase in packages to take effect when the new aged care system comes into operation, and that will now be on 1 November.

Q: So there will be no extra packages before November?

Butler:

As I said, this was part of a very big funding package, additional Support at Home packages as well as a range of changes to the residential aged care system to take effect with the introduction of the new aged care system, and that will now take effect on 1 November.

Q: Minister, not everyone in the sector, I know that you’re saying that some people in the sector asked for the delay, but this morning people like Ageing Australia, they’re saying that they can deal with more home care services now as we speak, and we need those home care services in the system to avoid a massive backlog.
Butler:

I understand what they’ve been saying over the last little while. But if you have a look at their media commentary in the lead in and after the decision was taken to delay the aged care system’s commencement date from 1 November, their message was very clear. They didn’t feel that we were ready as a country to move to an entirely new aged care system. They knew what that would mean,
which is that the introduction of a new Support at Home system would also be delayed by four months. We recognised that by continuing to put the vacant packages back into the system in the interim period.