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

I, too, rise to add my support to the Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission Bill 2018. The Carnell-Paterson review recommended bringing together the functions of the Aged Care Quality Agency and the Aged Care Complaints Commissioner. This was one of the 10 recommendations included in the Carnell-Paterson review. As the member for Hindmarsh—which is one of the oldest electorates in the country; I like to call it the wisest electorate in the country, because with age comes wisdom—I hear from constituents regularly who feel that they don't have a voice. They perhaps feel that they have worked all their lives, they've done everything for this nation, and now, in those twilight years towards the end, they are not getting the services that they require or that their loved ones are not receiving the services they require. So I sincerely hope that this bill will go some way to restoring the confidence of aged-care consumers and our senior citizens, in this period when they need these services.

Again, right up-front, I would like to acknowledge all the men and women who work in the aged-care sector. They include the carers, nurses, doctors, staff, kitchen staff and cleaners who keep the places going—especially the carers, because this is National Carers Week, which is celebrated between 14 and 20 October.

As I said, this bill is designed to provide a single point of contact for aged-care consumers and providers of aged care in relation to quality of care and the regulation that will be responsible for the accreditation, assessment and monitoring of, and complaints-handling for, aged-care services and Commonwealth funded aged-care services. The commissioner will be appointed for five years. The commission will regulate all areas of aged-care services, including residential aged-care services, home care services, flexible care services, the Commonwealth Home Support Program and the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Flexible Aged Care Program.

About 1.3 million Australians are currently receiving some form of aged care, and that care is provided by approximately 400,000 nurses and carers. It's predicted that by 2056 the aged-care workforce will need to triple, and that takes us to around one million workers that will be required to care for and deliver services to the numbers of people—approximately 3.5 million older Australians—who will require those services.

Public expenditure on aged care is expected to double as a share of the economy by 2050. Billions of dollars have been cut—as we all know, from that horror budget of 2014-15. But we know that public expenditure is expected to double as a share of the economy by 2050. The Prime Minister, the then Treasurer, cut almost $2 billion in his first year as Treasurer. You cannot take $2 billion out of an industry and not expect it to suffer. Is it any wonder that the system is in crisis?

There are well over 108,000 people on the home care package waiting list, including 88,000 people with high needs, many living with dementia. As I've said in this place many times before, and as we've heard other speakers say, in the future we will judge ourselves as a nation by how we treated our elderly. We know that that figure of 108,000 blows out every quarter because there are more people going on the waiting list.

A classic example of this is a particular constituent who rang me the other day. We are trying to assist him, and we have written to the Minister for Senior Australians and Aged Care. He is looking after his aunty, an elderly woman in her mid-80s and who is on the list waiting for an aged-care package. She has been on that list for well over six months. She has now deteriorated and needs a higher-standard package, so she has to go through the assessment all over again, and there could be another six-month wait period. So she is waiting for another six months on top of the six she has been waiting for, which takes it to 12. She will deteriorate again before the package is handed to her. We're working with the minister's office to try to assist them and help them. When Philip rang me last week, he was beside himself. He wants to assist his aunty, who has no-one else to care for her and look after her.

Talking about the home care packages, there's a big debate about this in terms of people wanting to stay at home. If you speak to most Australians, they wish to stay at home, and with good services and good care packages they can achieve this. Unfortunately, there is not enough to go around. There is a desperate need. The release of the March 2018 data sadly reveals there are now more than 108,000 older Australians that are waiting on that list for a home care package. Many are deteriorating while they're waiting, so the package and the care that they will receive will not be up to scratch for their needs, and they will have to be reassessed and go onto higher packages. The waiting times are completely unacceptable. The numbers that we talk about are absolutely shocking. As I said, it's 108,000 and increasing every quarter. Many of these people are waiting with high needs, and many have dementia. Approximately 88,000 people who have high needs are on the waiting list.

It's now clear that the government and the minister have to do all that they can to curb that growing list and do whatever it takes to ensure that people receive the care that's required. We'll need to see a tripling of the aged-care workforce in the next 30 years to provide a high standard of living and care for this growing proportion of older Australians. Are we preparing ourselves for this? Is the government prepared? I'd say no. It's also predicted that the aged-care workforce requirements will need to increase from approximately 366,000 to around one million by 2050. Is the government prepared for this? Are we working towards this? I'd say no again.

Since government dumped Labor's $1.5 billion workforce compact and supplement after the 2013 election, we on this side have consistently called for the development of a comprehensive aged-care policy. We know that this government's been here for five years since 2013, and they will have been in government for up to six years before the next election comes. We know that the aged-care crisis has grown and become worse. It's been ignored. We on this side have said that it is an absolute priority that we should fix this. The last budget failed to fix the aged-care crisis. We saw funding for 14,000 new in-home aged-care packages over four years. This is cruel and made even worse by the fact that the funding is coming from within the existing aged-care budget. Those 3½ thousand places a year aren't even enough to keep pace with demand. It feels like this government tries to plug a hole and a great big crack opens and gushes out from another place. We're not dealing with it.

It's particularly worrying that the government promised older Australians it would address the waitlist when we know that it will not address the waiting list. We know that the government's promised the world to older Australians waiting on the queue for a home care package. As I said earlier, there are 108,000 people waiting, and every quarter there's another 15,000 to 20,000 going on that list. It was this side of the House that introduced the Living Longer Living Better ageing reforms in 2012. The opposition leader, Bill Shorten, said in his budget reply speech that an elected Labor government will make dementia and ageing an absolute national priority.

We've seen the government finally concede, after many months of discussions, media reports and newspaper articles, that a royal commission is required to deal with a crisis that has unfolded on their watch. They denied that anything was required, but now they have finally conceded. That's a good thing, and I'm happy to see that it will be based in my state of South Australia. I support the royal commission, as do all of us on this side, but after five years in government every one of those opposite must accept some responsibility for this happening and what's going on in the aged-care system. We can't call ourselves a fair and generous country until we give elderly Australians the love, care and respect that they deserve. After all, they're the ones that built this nation that we prosper in today because of their hard work and sacrifices.

What do we get from this government? It's failed to rule out any further cuts to aged care. The Prime Minister was asked this question directly a couple of weeks ago and he declined to rule out cutting further funding from the care of older Australians. Australians are rightly appalled by the shocking stories that we see, the horrendous images on TV, the Four Corners programs and the crisis that exists in our nation's aged-care system, particularly the standard of care being delivered in some nursing homes. Why won't the Prime Minister rule out further cuts to this area? As Treasurer, the Prime Minister cut $1.2 billion from aged care in his first budget. You can't cut that amount of money from a particular area and think it doesn't have an affect. His $1.2 billion cut in the budget came on top of the almost $500 million he cut from aged-care funding in the 2015 MYEFO. This money went out of the aged-care budget and it didn't come back. This cut hits older Australians in residential aged-care facilities. It hits them the hardest, with a 50 per cent cut to the indexation of complex healthcare subsidies. The royal commission must examine the impact of these years of cuts. You don't fix aged care by cutting it; you fix it by funding it.

To date there have been more than a dozen reviews. We've had hundreds of recommendations on this issue and they've all been ignored by the government. This isn't good enough. For all of the claims of the baby boomer budget earlier this year, the Prime Minister, then Treasurer, again cut further funding from residential aged care to try and fix the growing crisis in home care that was created by the government by cutting it to begin with. The Prime Minister and the Liberals can't be trusted to ensure older Australians get the services that they need and require. As we've heard from other speakers, the Prime Minister was the architect of those cuts, which have gutted aged care and put the sector under immense pressure. You can't rip out that amount of money, close to $2 billion, from an aged-care system over five years and not have an impact on quality. It's common sense.

As I've said, as the representative for an area that has one of the highest ageing populations in the country, I've met and spoken with many constituents and people in the sector, who often complain about the tin-ear approach of the agencies and the way this policy is set up through this government. The government must explain to the Australian people how these continuous cuts to the aged-care budget have contributed to the crisis that we now face in aged care. The Prime Minister, as I said, was then the Treasurer who signed off on all those cuts to aged care in the 2016 budget; then he complains that there's a problem. Can you believe it—you cut and then you complain about it? When you make those cuts, it has devastating affects. The Prime Minister needs to tell them what he did and why he did it and come clean that he did cut aged-care funding. It's on the public record. We argued this point during the last sittings. The Prime Minister said that it was a lie to say he had cut funding to aged care. But all you have to do is look at the budget papers that were signed off by the Prime Minister when he was Treasurer. These cuts that he's denying are right there in black and white on page 101 of Budget Paper No. 2. But we all know that the infighting and the divisions that were taking place would have been their priority instead of looking at aged care and these issues at the time. It's time that the government started doing better on this critical area of policy.

I've always said that we should judge ourselves as a nation by how we treat our elderly—the people who have worked hard, the people who can no longer look after themselves, the people who have brought up children, grandchildren and in some cases great-grandchildren. They have kept family units together and have done everything for Australia as workers and as contributors, and now it's our time to look after them. I think it's an absolute disgrace that we don't have confidence in our aged-care systems in place. We should do everything we can to absolutely fix this because these people deserve better.

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