Steve Georganas (Hindmarsh, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I too rise to speak on the Aged Care Amendment (Residential Care) Bill 2006. There seems to be a bit of a carers theme in this chamber this week. Yesterday, we spoke on a private member’s motion acknowledging Carers Week, and I took the opportunity to speak in this House yesterday on the care given to children by their grandparents. Today, we speak about the care given to many grandparents in Australia who are perhaps in aged-care homes.

I was interested to hear what the member for Riverina had to say—how everything is smelling of roses in this area. It is certainly not that way in the electorate that I represent, the electorate of Hindmarsh, which is the oldest electorate in the country, with the highest number of aged people in the country. In the electorate of Hindmarsh, which covers the western and southern metropolitan area of Hindmarsh, there has been a continuous shortage of beds since the government started to count the number of beds in 1998. We have had a constant shortage of approximately 200 to 300 beds. Those figures came straight from the minister in reply to a question on notice that I put to him asking how many beds were in those regions from 1996 onwards. He could not give me the figures for 1996 or 1997 but he certainly could give me the figures from 1998 onwards. There has been a constant shortage of beds in the western and southern region of Adelaide’s inner west, in the metropolitan area, where the seat of Hindmarsh is.

I would like to note the amendment contained within schedule 2 of the bill. This amendment allows the Secretary of the Department of Health and Ageing to delegate to members of the aged-care assessment teams the ability to extend the maximum number of days of respite care for families who are in need. Ordinarily it has been a maximum of 63 days of respite care per year, or around five days per month. The flexibility made available by this amendment increases the potential days of respite to a maximum of 84, or seven days per month—a noteworthy increase which will be of substantial benefit to those who need it most.

The flexibility to extend respite care for senior Australians whose families need assistance is something that I believe many people around the nation will view as a substantial shot in the arm. I note that all three submissions received by the Senate committee investigating this bill were supportive of this measure. Submissions were received from the AMA, National Seniors and the Department of Health and Ageing. The amendment puts into legislation the government’s previously announced spot-check activity. In fact, the government has announced universal annual spot checks on nursing homes on a couple of occasions now, but the history of this level of quality control has been seen to be more about the announcement, as we see in many areas with this government, than the actual practice of implementation.

After the kerosene bath exploded under the former minister some six years ago, it was announced that each and every one of the 3,000-odd aged-care facilities in the nation would receive a spot check each year. That has never, ever happened. Last year, only 563 were graced with such assistance. This commitment was repeated at the time of the budget this year in the wake of the sexual assault allegations earlier on in the year. The extent to which the industry is assisted through the presence of departmental agents conducting spot checks is subject to what they actually check, of course. Given the government’s history on this point over the last six years, it is regrettable, but perhaps par for the course, that it is envisaged that only a number of the 44 Aged Care Standards and Accreditation Agency quality outcomes will be assessed at any spot checks. I think this is very regrettable. I believe we owe it to our senior Australians to do what we can to assist them to enjoy their later life in satisfactory surrounds and with the appropriate support they need.

The assistance potentially available to residents and nursing homes through spot checks was identified by the minister recently when a facility in Victoria was assessed as failing to meet 30 of the 44 standards by the Aged Care Standards and Accreditation Agency’s assessment team—an assessment that was overruled by the agency, which reportedly offered the facility the opportunity to immediately take necessary measures to bring its standards up to scratch. I am sure that all concerned would appreciate that managing facilities is not an easy job but would still identify the meeting of standards as important and would wish the facility in question every success in maintaining the improvements one would hope they have made at this point.

If the government does not agree with this approach, with assisting facilities to identify areas that need improvement in accordance with all 44 standards, if the government is proposing that the human resource cost of assessing facilities against 44 standards is unduly onerous and substantially reduces the number of facilities that can conceivably be visited in a year, and if the number of visits by assessment teams is more important than what they are able to positively contribute to the industry and the facilities therein, I wonder whether the government should be reducing, perhaps consolidating, the number of standards. Fundamentally, we all want the industry to continue to develop into a stable and sustainable element within the broader Australian residential and health service sectors, and I am sure the majority of service providers do a very good job in difficult circumstances. Within and close to the electorate of Hindmarsh, from what I have seen in existing facilities and even on paper in the odd blueprint and funding application we see, I certainly believe this to be the case.

I would like to note that the current coverage of spot checks would be even more limited if the government managed to provide the number of facilities required to meet their target of 88 beds per 1,000 people aged 70 or over. The recently released June 2006 stocktake of residential aged-care beds in Australia shows that the provision ratio of aged-care beds in Adelaide’s western and southern suburbs has fallen since the Minister for Health and Ageing took over the Ageing portfolio nine months ago. I mentioned, at the beginning of my speech, the undersupply of 287 beds in areas of the federal electorate of Hindmarsh, as at the December 2005 stocktake. Since then the situation has worsened to a shortfall of 315 beds in June 2006.

The government will claim that they have put millions of dollars into aged care and allocated numbers of beds, but allocating a bed and having a bed come to fruition are two completely different things. And in an electorate like Hindmarsh, which has one of the oldest populations in the country, the population is ageing at a faster rate than the rate at which beds are being allocated, and therefore we are constantly playing catch-up; we constantly have a shortage of beds.

As I said, the operational ratio of residential aged-care beds in each aged-care planning region in Australia should be 88 beds for every 1,000 people aged 70 years and over—and that is according to the government’s own figures. The target ratio and the ratio which is realised are not of as much concern to the public as the availability of satisfactory accommodation and care when it is needed by some of the most vulnerable members of our adult Australian community. But regrettably the government has not even met its own benchmark. Worse, the position is actually deteriorating in my electorate.

For all the minister’s promises, bed numbers in proportion to need within Hindmarsh, as defined by the government itself, have actually fallen by 28 since December 2005—that is virtually 10 per cent in less than one year. In 10 long years, this government has managed to turn a national surplus of 800 aged-care beds in 1996 into a 4,613 shortfall by June 2006. We are going backwards under this government. This is just not good enough.

As I said earlier, in my electorate since 1998 there has been a constant shortage, and that shortage is growing. The aged-care minister will argue he has increased the numbers of community packages. Let me put it on record that Labor supports the number of community packages and we support the increase in the number of those packages. We welcome the provision of community care but this should not be at the expense of aged-care beds.

The minister has also stated that the identification of the government’s sub-par and worsening record is no cause for alarm, as the government’s target will be met in 2008. This is of little comfort for those people who need beds now and their families. It is of very little comfort. What faith can the community have in this administration reaching its target when in six months the shortfall has ballooned out by as much as 10 per cent? How can any concerned observer or future service recipient have any faith in such a government or take any comfort from its record of turning a national surplus of 800 aged-care beds in 1996 into a 4,613 shortfall by June 2006?

With the ageing of the population and the increasing levels of frailty that go along with ageing, when someone needs a bed they need it straightaway. According to the Productivity Commission, the time people wait to access a bed in aged care doubled in the period from 2000 to 2005. I am continually seeing the effects of the Howard government’s policies in the faces of ageing constituents and their families. I am hearing it in their voices and seeing it in their eyes.

Regardless of the rosy picture painted by the member for Riverina, two constituents of mine come to mind. The first is a 90-year-old woman who waited 12 weeks in the Flinders Medical Centre—a public hospital—because they could not find an aged-care bed in the western region for her.

The second is a woman who came to see me. Her husband had been in a public bed in the Royal Adelaide Hospital for nine weeks waiting for a nursing home bed in the western region. Both these people were very distressed. In fact, the first woman I spoke about, who was in the Flinders Medical Centre in Adelaide, had been a volunteer for many, many years. She drove one of the community buses. If this is the way this government treats our elderly it is a sign of what sort of prosperity we have. We might talk about economic prosperity but there is also a social prosperity—and on social prosperity this government fails.

People make much of the baby boomer generation, which is rapidly approaching retirement in very substantial numbers, and the comparatively low value of superannuation contributions much of this generation will, in the first instance, be expected to live on. People look to the future with something approaching dread but also something akin to a sense of inevitability, especially in terms of the financial security—or lack thereof. People are looking into the almost immediate future and seeing hundreds of thousands of Australians facing increasingly tough times for, in most cases, a highly substantial and significant proportion of their lives.

With little behind them but the family home and limited means of generating post-preservation-age income, people are asking what this government has done for 10 years. Alan Fells and Fred Brenchley state that the current administration itself may appear due for retirement as a result of not having addressed the community’s concerns, given the ample time that they have squandered in the last decade. And—I say it again—in the western suburbs of my electorate of Hindmarsh they are actually falling further behind in terms of aged-care beds.

What does it say about our society if we do not even provide sufficient care for our parents or our grandparents? We, as a society, owe it to our senior residents to make proper care available. These are people—I have said this many times—who have fought in wars and who have worked all their lives to build the foundations of our nation. They have paid their taxes. We are hitting them with another tax, the GST, in their old age. We should be offering them all the assistance we can so that they can live out the remainder of their lives knowing that they will be cared for in an aged-care facility, if that is what they need.

Finally, coming back to schedule 1 of the amendment bill, gifting is being brought into line with rules applied through the Social Security Act 1991 for age pensioners and the Veterans’ Entitlements Act 1986 for the calculation of testable assets. It is broadly held that this consistency promotes equity of access by giving people with greater capacity to pay their way the responsibility for doing so and targeting available government assistance to those most in need. This is a principle with substantial history in Australia and is generally supported as being fair and reasonable.

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