Tony Windsor (New England, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

I support the Aged Care Amendment (Residential Care) Bill 2006. I would like to make a few comments on aged care. The legislative change that the government is proposing is quite acceptable.

I listened to the member for Shortland a moment ago. I agreed with quite a bit of what she had to say, but I remember a debate that took place in this place—probably two years ago now—where a number of people alluded to the bureaucratic expense of running the aged-care facilities right across Australia. From memory—I stand to be corrected—something like 30 per cent of the total expenditure on aged care was in some way administrative. We have to bear in mind that in delivering services to any community—whether it be aged care or care for younger people or people with disabilities—we do not want to let the bureaucratic process consume too much of the funding arrangements. That is not to say that there should not be spot checks, but if we are going to develop a system where we have 30,000 spot checks we want to bear in mind the cost that that involves and the impact that the cost may have on the provision of beds. We are all arguing for more beds for our particular constituencies.

I compliment the government on the progress that it has made in aged care. There has been a lot of progress in recent years, not only in the number of beds that have been allocated in high and low care but also with the capital works and facilities that some of our older people are now housed in. Some of the accommodation that our aged-care facilities have is by far the best accommodation that some of those older people will have lived in. There are some outstanding facilities.

In the electorate of New England, there are some wonderful facilities that the community is involved in. Those facilities are very much appreciated by people within the electorate. The electorate of New England has a number of smaller and medium-sized communities. That is not unusual for country electorates. One of the successes that I have seen in my time in the federal parliament—and I compliment the state governments as well as the federal government, particularly the New South Wales state government—has been the multipurpose service arrangements that have been put in place.

For those who do not know about these—and I am quite aware that many in the press gallery would like to be aware of this; it is good to see you here—a multipurpose service, or MPS, is essentially a hospital with an aged-care facility, with the hospital services, the acute care services, being provided by the state government and the aged-care beds being provided by the Commonwealth government. I see this model as being a very successful arrangement between the state and the Commonwealth. It is a great shame that on a number of other levels, with some health and other issues, we have not had that cooperation. There is absolutely no doubt in my mind, and I think most people would agree, that the MPS model has been extremely successful and in fact has changed the fate of a lot of smaller country communities.

I was recently in a little place called Emmaville for their hospital fete. They have a multipurpose service facility. It was one of the first that was developed. I would like to relate their story, because it encapsulates the way in which agendas can be changed if people get involved in the process.

Some years back now—about five or six years back; it might even be seven—the general thrust of arrangements at the New South Wales state government level was that smaller hospitals were becoming fairly uneconomic. To maintain some degree of viability in an economic sense, they were housing aged people who were not sick. In other words, there was a distortion of the arrangements. The Commonwealth, through the aged-care sector, from time to time suggested that these people were not sick and should not be in hospital but should be in aged-care facilities. Obviously, the answer would come back: ‘There is no aged-care facility in our town, so what do you suggest we do with them?’ Even though no-one was actually saying it directly, the agenda was that they should go away—go to a bigger centre, go to the coast or go to buggery. It was a case of: ‘Go somewhere else, but not here, because we do not have a facility for you.’ That was the message that was being sent out quite subtly.

The Commonwealth and the state came together to look at that problem. The electorate of New England had a particularly high residential ratio of aged people in small hospitals who were not sick. As a consequence of that, a number of people formed a committee under the auspices of the state and federal governments. That committee was chaired by a former member for New England, Ian Sinclair, and you would be well aware of Mr Sinclair’s contribution in this place. To his credit and to the credit of the others on that committee, the MPS model was developed as a way of overcoming this dilemma of having aged people in a community where there was no aged-care facility, but who were not sick, having to leave that community. The MPS model was put in place.

Emmaville was one of the very first communities to receive an MPS. At the time a group of women in this community was headed by a lady called Ellie Seagrave. I will never forget this woman as long as I live. She is still alive—I was with her only a week or two ago. The hospital was called Vegetable Creek, and I am sure many members have visited Vegetable Creek. Emmaville is the site of the panther and the home of Debbie Wells, a lady who could run very fast. Ellie Seagrave and her group of women decided six or seven years back that, although their hospital was getting old and the pressure of the economics of running it was increasing, they were not going to lose their hospital. These women dug in and nobody was going to take their hospital away. This coincided with Ian Sinclair and others looking at what they could put in place. I compliment the Commonwealth government and the state government for the role they played, and I also pay credit to the then state health minister Craig Knowles, who worked with Ian Sinclair. Ian had left parliament at that point but he had agreed to chair this committee.

In the end Emmaville received an MPS, which is a combination of acute care hospital care and aged care. It has been extraordinarily successful. About 18 months ago I was in Emmaville again. They have done tremendous things with their MPS. Ellie Seagrave called me to a meeting and said: ‘You’re the federal member. We need more beds. Go and get us more beds.’ I said, ‘But, Ellie, the facility hasn’t been up and going all that long. When it was put in place, the number of beds was determined by formula et cetera,’ which other members have referred to. I asked what had happened, and I will never forget this lady telling me: ‘We need more beds because people who left Emmaville to go to the coast to retire want to come back. They want to come back to where they lived.’

I think this is a critical point for regional development: a lot of people have left communities in the country not because they wanted to but because they thought there was nothing for them in their later days. We were losing people in their 30s, 40s and maybe 50s who were saying: ‘What happens if we get old here? There’s nothing for us. We should relocate to a bigger centre or somewhere else where there will be some facilities for our future.’ That is a critical message that governments should take on board. But I congratulate the Commonwealth government and the state government for the way they have addressed that process.

The electorate of New England has more MPSs than any other country electorate in Australia, I think, partly because of this anomaly with the smaller hospitals. I pay tribute to a former political candidate for the National Party who ran against me when I first went into parliament in 1991, David Briggs, who administered the health system at that time. I pay tribute to him because he believed, quite rightly, that these people should be able to reside in the communities that they had made a contribution to and, if that meant using a small rural hospital as an aged-care facility when there was not a lot of demand for acute care beds there, so be it.

New England now has an MPS at Emmaville. The MPS at Guyra was opened only about a fortnight ago. In Walcha the tenders are under way. Bingara is getting an MPS. Barraba has one. No-one, including the bureaucracy, really expected that Tingha, a small town and Aboriginal community, would receive an MPS, because of its proximity to Inverell. I think many people are aware that Aboriginal people in particular have an affinity with their place and even 40 or 50 kilometres away is too far. I remember going to the meeting in Tingha. There were Commonwealth bureaucrats there, and the hall was absolutely packed. It was only a couple of years ago. I remember the Commonwealth bureaucrats were there to break the news to the people—and the state government was complicit in a sense—that they would not be able to have something at Tingha. I think there were something like 400 people in that hall, including some of the Aboriginal elders, and that reversed the process in Tingha. Tingha will receive an MPS, with aged-care beds and a hospital facility.

I give those two examples because they are examples where people on the ground have actually changed policy, particularly the Emmaville people, because of their stand. They were not going to allow a government of any persuasion to remove their hospital. They took that stand and Craig Knowles, to his credit, actually listened. Ian Sinclair, in his time, also listened and developed a model. Those ladies of Emmaville, in a sense, changed policy that is having an impact not only on their town but on many other towns. The people of Tingha and people in many other towns across Australia probably owe something to those ladies of Emmaville. I was at the Vegetable Creek fete about 10 days ago. It was incredible to see the number of people who turned up, the money they raised and the antics they got up to.

Warialda—which is on the edge of my electorate but is partly within a shire that is housed in my electorate—is getting an MPS, and Bundarra has a slightly different, community-driven modification of an MPS. I congratulate all those people, as I did the former Minister for Health and Ageing, Kevin Andrews, when I first came into this place, and the subsequent minister, Julie Bishop. I think they did a good job within the bounds. Obviously, one does not want to stand up and say that things are perfect, but they are not bad. There is room for improvement, but some very positive things have happened in aged care. The new Minister for Health and Ageing—who I do not know terribly well—is obviously new to the job and I wish him well. But I do congratulate both the state and the federal government on the work they have done on those concepts.

I make one slightly less positive comment in relation to our old soldiers—some of whom may be in aged-care facilities; others may not—particularly people who served during the Second World War. Many of us have men now aged 85 or 90 in our electorates who did not serve where there was an angry shot fired and who did not, under the veterans’ affairs legislation, have qualifying service and therefore are not in a position to receive the gold card. The nation is currently trying to encourage young people into the Army. We are even trying to encourage them through a ‘try before you buy’ method—have a year and see how it goes.

We need people in our armed services, but we have this example hanging out there, where people who served for five years during the Second World War, who were prepared to go where their nation or their Prime Minister ordered that they go, who were prepared to put their lives at risk for the rest of us, are now being treated differently from their colleagues. If they happened to be in Darwin one day and not in Darwin the next they are being treated differently. There are people—and I am sure we have them in all our electorates—who trained to be paratroopers, who injured themselves during those jumps, learning to protect this nation, who now need help because of those injuries. To not grant these people the gold card is an absolute disgrace.

I compliment the government on the aged-care facilities, but I think the government should be damned for not providing the gold card to these people and, probably more importantly, for the way that it is treating some citizens differently from other citizens. That is having a psychological effect on many of those people in our communities.

I would ask the parliamentary secretary to convey my remarks to the Minister for Community Services and the Prime Minister. The Prime Minister is constantly saying that this is a nation that can afford to do this and that. If we cannot afford to look after our aged people, particularly those aged people who were prepared to keep this country for the rest of us to be able to live the life that we are now living, then I think it is something that we have to look very closely at.

These Second World War veterans in their eighties are dying at the rate of 800 a month, so it will not be an everlasting 50-year expense to provide them with a gold card. I think it is time that we started to have a good, close look, in a respectful way, at the way we have treated these people. Bearing in mind that we have spent a lot of time in the last few weeks talking about the psychological problems that farmers are having in terms of the drought, many of these elderly men are suffering severe psychological problems because of the way they have been treated. That is partly due to the way in which the RSL treated them after the war. It is very similar to what happened—in their minds; it might not be in ours—to many of the Vietnam veterans and the way they were treated when they came home. These people were prepared to go wherever they were ordered to go. My father served in the Middle East. If the Japanese had invaded Australia, he would have been a hell of a lot of good over there to my mother, wouldn’t he? These veterans were here to defend the nation, had it been invaded, and as older people now I think they deserve the utmost respect of our society and our government. I call upon the government to do the right thing and honour these people with a gold card.

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