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

I am very glad to be in this place giving support for the greater protection of some of our community’s most vulnerable members in the form of the Aged Care Amendment (Security and Protection) Bill 2007. I am happy to give in-principle support at this time. Last week the Selection of Bills Committee referred this bill to the Senate Standing Committee on Community Affairs for inquiry. I look forward to reading the thoughts of people in the community on the detail of this bill and to perhaps making further comment after the report is made available in approximately one month’s time.

I am aware that allegations have been made by members of the community in the past of mistreatment of our elderly citizens within nursing homes. That prospect disgusts me, as it would all members of this House. The notion that adult people can stoop so low as to physically and/or sexually abuse these people is abhorrent. It is absolutely beyond belief that this can happen to the very people who have nurtured this generation and raised probably most of us here, the very people who have served this nation so substantially and selflessly in times of war and crisis and through depressions, paid their taxes and worked all their lives, the very people who have turned this country into the modern, democratic success that we all have the benefit of. The least that we can do for these people is to allow them to live in dignity in their twilight years.

So I totally support the full authority of the Commonwealth of Australia being harnessed and directed to protect those Australians who are residents of aged-care facilities and to investigate alleged instances of abuse. It is not just physical and/or sexual abuse involved. There are lots of other forms of abuse, such as financial abuse. Financial abuse of the elderly—that is, taking advantage of the elderly or, for that matter, others in the community—has only been drawn to the public’s attention for a relatively short time. With more people saving greater amounts for their retirement, the bigger bank balances simply make them bigger targets for the grubbier thieves and snake-oil merchants that, regrettably, are amongst us.

Interest in the physical and/or sexual abuse of elderly Australians has rarely received attention in the past, other than through the very occasional home invasion that we hear about on the nightly news where, against someone of senior years, the most pathetic of all cowards throws away his soul, beating and raping his helpless victim. It is very difficult to even approximate the incidence of abuse within aged-care facilities around the country. It has been suggested that, after applying the ratios from the United States—where mandatory reporting is necessary in law—to the Australian context, there could be as many as 80,000 instances of elder abuse occurring throughout Australia each year.

Any incidence of elder abuse is abhorrent, as I said earlier, to all of us in this House, to the majority of Australians and to Australian society. The current federal government did note allegations of rape within Victorian nursing homes in 2005, and I expect they noted similar ones in Queensland sometime later. In the Victorian case, charges of four rapes and two indecent assaults were laid against a former personal care attendant. According to reports, one alleged survivor’s grand-daughter described the situation as ‘distressing and horribly sad’—as it would be. The Prime Minister himself reportedly expressed ‘horror, disgust and almost disbelief’ at the allegations. This was only six or so months after the damning Senate report of June 2005 identified the limitations of and discouragement within the complaints resolution scheme.

So we have a Senate report drawing attention to the unsatisfactory nature of the complaints resolution scheme, six months later the Prime Minister expressing his deepest and most sincere regret that such depravity occurs, the media being fed the line—this is in February last year, mind you; almost a year ago—that ‘new laws loom on nursing home rape’, and the minister pledging to stamp out elder abuse in such homes on 13 March last year. Now, in February 2007, some 12 months after the PM expressed his disgust and the honourable senator pledged to stamp out abuse, the government sees fit to throw up this bill, referring it straight off to a Senate inquiry which is only going to report on 14 March, and then the government is expecting the bill to be implemented as early as 1 April 2007.

I have never heard of or seen such a serious issue receiving no apparent attention for so long and then, within the space of seven weeks, we hear of a bill racing its way through the system to become law before we know it. My question to the Prime Minister and to the minister responsible is: why for heaven’s sake have you taken a whole year to progress notionally satisfactory arrangements, when it only looks like taking you a couple of months to make the changes? Why has it taken a whole year to try to implement this? Why wait a year from the conviction demonstrated in the media before acting? Why wait almost two years from the Senate report’s identification of the need to act? I hope the minister has not simply cobbled this together as a part of his homework—as a part of his late-night, last-minute cram—before heading off to his electoral examination. He may have been aware of the problem since becoming minister and he may have been speaking with industry and consumer groups, but to drop a bill on the parliament, send it off to a committee and take it as read that it will be law within seven-odd weeks does diminish one’s confidence.

Whether or not this has gone to cabinet, I do not know. You cannot put much faith in anything coming from certain sectors of the current administration. They did not even seem to be aware of the fact that the Murray-Darling system is not, in fact, within Western Australia. The issue of aged-care abuse deserves serious consideration and sound legislative practice—I hope that is what we have evidence of here, despite the peculiar timetable that this government has selected—but it also deserves attention more urgent than the government has appeared to be prepared to give it.

The minister has had the unfortunate task of saving the government from itself on aged care. Only given some 12 months to resurrect the government’s pretence of caring about aged care, after 10 years of aged care sector neglect, reliance on phantasm and delivering little more than deep concern within the aged-care sector, the minister has just announced a sum of money to be delivered over five years—in an election year. That is most surprising. This, after allowing the aged-care sector to starve for funds to the point of dropping to its knees. The government created, through its own lack of interest in the sector and its obsession with playing to interest groups, a funding system that never worked. Remember the time of the kerosene baths?

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