Leadership Quote by Julie Bishop

“Fundamental, essential, enduring” is politician-speak doing a very specific job: it turns a contested policy choice into something that sounds like physics. Julie Bishop isn’t arguing for community care so much as trying to remove it from argument altogether. The triple-stack of near-synonyms works like a verbal seatbelt, tightening around the listener so the claim feels secure, inevitable, bipartisan.

The phrase “community care” itself is strategically soft. It conjures dignity, familiarity, staying in your own home, the comforting fiction that a “community” is always there. It also sidesteps what community care often means in practice: unpaid family labor (frequently women), underpaid and casualized workers, long travel times, fragmented services, and the quiet rationing that happens when hospital and residential beds are scarce. Calling it “our aged care system” adds a national-ownership glow, smoothing over the fact that aged care is a patchwork of federal funding, private providers, and ever-shifting eligibility rules.

The context matters: Australian aged care has cycled through recurring scandals, inquiries, and reform packages, with governments under pressure to show compassion while managing budgets. Community-based services are usually cheaper than residential care and politically easier to sell. Bishop’s line signals stability and commitment, but it also functions as a pre-emptive defense against critiques that the system pushes older people “home” because it’s cost-effective, not because it’s best-resourced.

The intent is reassurance. The subtext is triage dressed as values.