E&OE...
Well thank you very much Louise. My Ministerial colleague Santo Santoro, Sister Josita [inaudible], ladies and gentlemen, my fellow Australians is a better way of describing it. Can I say how very happy I am to be here again in Louise's electorate of Greenway, to be at this wonderful aged care facility and to acknowledge two things. To acknowledge the enormous contribution made by various orders and various sections of the Catholic Church in Australia over the years to the care of the aged. The Catholic Church has a wonderful record of caring for Australians at every stage of their life, not least of course in their older years. And I pay tribute, I pay an unconditional tribute to the contribution of the Catholic Church to the care of the aged within our community.
Can I also pay a tribute because this facility has a special flavour and character about it. Can I pay a special tribute to the wonderful contribution that people from Poland have made to the building of the modern Australia. They really are wonderful citizens, you've brought a resolute, defiant, enlivening spirit to our nation and we are very grateful for it. I look around this gathering, and you belong to a generation that came from a tragic part of Europe and you experienced things that those of us who've spent all of our lives living in this blessed country of Australia didn't. And we are all the more grateful and all the more admiring as a consequence of the contribution that you have made to our nation.
Today I've come with my Ministerial colleague Santo Santoro, who's done a wonderful job as Minister for Ageing in the time that he's had the portfolio, to announce a further contribution of $1.5 billion to aged care in this country. Let me put this in context, the simple fact is that over the next 20 years, as the baby boomers, as they're called, go into retirement, we will see the number of people over the age of 70 double. Simple statistic. It's a good thing. We're all living longer, we're all living healthier, longer lives and that is to be encouraged and appreciated. But it does of course mean that we need to put additional resources and we also have to recognise that there are two areas where those additional resources must go into. We must increase the financial commitment as a community we make to residential aged care facilities such as this, to give the providers in facilities such as this the wherewithal in a combination of ways to better care for the growing number of people in the older section of the population.
We must also recognise that people naturally want to remain in their own homes as long as possible, and one of the emphases in this package is on providing more community care places for people who want to stay in their homes longer. But it means logically the longer you stay in your own home with care being brought in, that when you do finally feel the need to go into an aged care facility, you are perhaps needing more help, more intensive care than might have been the case if you had gone in several years earlier.
And this package endeavours to meet both of those needs. We're making it a total cost of $1.46 billion. We're putting about $410 million over five years into an additional 7200 community care places. They're the places where people go into homes and look after people, provide them with care, so they can remain in their own home longer. We're going to increase by $490 million the commitment over five years into high care residential need because as people come in perhaps needing more care because they've been able to stay in their own home longer, the cost of caring for them is necessarily higher, and therefore you have to put more resources into that.
We're not going to increase accommodation payments for any existing residents. I want to make that very clear. We will be providing, according to need, for new residents in stages some increase in the residential charges and a commensurate increase in the matching payments coming from the Government. But importantly no increases for people already there, or here, or wherever and only for those new residents and whatever the payment you are committed to when you go in as a new resident, that's what you keep for the time that you are in the home. We're not intending to introduce accommodation bonds, I want to make that very clear.
We're also going to see that we have a better matching of the funding for the care. We have this thing that goes under the, romances under the title I think that call it an aged care funding instalment. It sounds very, very bureaucratic but, yes, yes don't give me acronyms Santo please. Don't give me any acronyms. But what basically we're going to do is we're going to put another $390 million into this device and it's really a way of providing additional help to residential facilities where a lot of people need high care. And we're going to add to the money we already provide for that but we're going to add in the area where people need high care because that essentially is what people want.
We're also going to introduce a fairer income tested care fee so that self-funded retirees in the same financial position are treated identically to pensioners. We're not going to reduce the support for pensioners, but we're going to recognise that you should get support according to your financial position, irrespective of whether you are a pensioner or a self-funded retiree. And if they're in the same financial position, they should get the same help and that's going to cost about $90 million. And then we're going to provide some more help for disadvantaged older people and people in remote areas, including indigenous people and homeless people and that is going to cost another $42 million.
And very importantly, there are a number of aged care facilities that used to be run by state governments and are now run privately. And for a combination of historical reasons, the amount of subsidy they receive from the Federal Government was lower than the subsidy they gave to other homes, and we're going to remove that anomaly and at the cost of $25 million we're going to pay them the same amount.
There are a few other things relating to administration and regulation and so forth that are going to cost a few million dollars. Everything always costs a few million dollars. But the important thing is, it's about $1.5 billion, roughly four to five hundred million of that is going into the aged care packages, that is providing more help for people to be cared for, intensively cared for in their own homes, and about a billion dollars going directly into the residential care sector.
Now this, for the benefit of those who follow this debate very, very closely, this is the final response, or certainly the second and largely final response to the Hogan Review of Aged Care Accommodation, and that led back in 2004 to the injection of more than $2 billion into the sector, and this represents the next stage.
So it is a very big investment, made possible by the fact that we have a strong economy and a strong budget surplus. I mean we build up surpluses, and you've got to do good things with them. And you can't spend money on aged care, you can't spend money on defence, you can't spend money on anything if you don't have it. And fortunately we have it because we've got a strong economy that's been well managed and we're going to commit this extra $1.5 billion into aged care.
So I will leave it at that. I do want to again thank Holy Family for allowing me to come here, Sister, thank you very, very much. And I deeply appreciate the courtesy and hospitality that you've extended to me and to my colleagues Louise and Santo. And may I just say again what a wonderful job Santo is doing. He toils and works hard and he badgers his colleagues, his Prime Minister for more money and he's been very successful and he's done a great job and I am very happy to be with him here today but God bless you all, thank you.
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