Help for elderly to stay at home

ELDERLY Australians will be able to live in their own homes longer in a billion-dollar boost to aged care as a centrepiece of today’s federal Budget.

The massive cash injection is expected to pay for thousands of home-care packages to help retirees with transport, meals, cleaning and gardening instead of forcing them into nursing homes.

Tax relief for middleincome workers and a $24.5 billion infrastructure bonanza are the other headline reforms, as speculation mounts that Treasurer Scott Morrison will get the Budget back into surplus a year early.

Mr Morrison said the Budget would be “a statement of values” about the Federal Government’s commitment to elderly Australians.

“As you get older, you should not have to sacrifice unnecessarily in choices, and you should not have to sacrifice your dignity either . . . we want to protect that in this Budget,” he said.

“The challenge and the task is to better plan and preserve the choices of older Australians, to maintain those choices and indeed broaden them where we’re able to do that.”

The treasurer dodged questions about whether the Government would scrap plans to increase the pension age to 70, but he said Australia needed to embrace its ageing population instead of seeing it “as some sort of burden or curse”.

While the Government has trumpeted its income tax cuts, it is understood Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull will home in on aged care when selling the Budget this week.

Coalition strategists have identified the 4.8 million voters aged over 60 as critical to their re-election hopes, particularly in the wake of the Labor Opposition’s controversial plan to strip away cash refunds for dividend tax imputation.

Labor has demanded the Government invest in the home-care system, which has more than 100,000 older Australians on a waiting list.