Joanne Ryan (Lalor, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise today to speak on the Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission Bill 2018 and the Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission (Consequential Amendments and Transitional Provisions) Bill 2018.

Like my Labor colleagues, I agree to support the bills but want to note the strong concern that we all share about this government's slow response to introduce this legislation to the parliament. Today has been a day of listening to speaker after speaker on that side of the chamber, the government members: a cacophony of pathos to camouflage a complete lack of action in this space. As a nation, we should judge ourselves by how we treat our elderly. For all that older Australians have given our country throughout their working lives, they deserve respect and dignity. Recent revelations in the media confirm what Labor has been saying for a long time: that the aged-care sector is in a state of crisis. Like many local residents who have contacted me, I was appalled when I watched the shocking stories on the ABC Four Corners program. The investigations at the Oakden facility were equally disturbing yet occurred some years ago now. Like many, I was particularly shocked by the standard of care being delivered in some residential aged-care facilities.

There has been a public outcry for action on the quality of care older Australians are receiving in residential aged-care facilities, and rightly so. Our older Australians in residential aged-care facilities deserve so much better than what we've seen on our television screens. They deserve dignity and they deserve to be cared for as if they were being cared for by a loved one. It is clear that the current regulatory framework that should be protecting older Australians is not working. Current reporting mechanisms are overly complex and accessing information about complaints is equally difficult.

These bills are an opportunity to restore faith in the aged-care sector. However, the government has unfortunately missed the mark yet again. There are around 1.3 million Australians currently receiving some form of aged care, provided by around 400,000 nurses and carers. It is predicted that by 2056 the aged-care sector will increase to around one million workers, with 3½ million older people requiring care. The legislation before us today is in response to the Oakden investigation and a Senate inquiry which triggered the government to commission the Review of National Aged Care Quality Regulatory Processes, known as the Carnell-Paterson review. The report of the review was given to the Turnbull government on 23 October 2017. We stand here today, in October 2018, with a piece of legislation in front of us that will respond to some of the elements and the recommendations from that review. These bills go some way to responding to the 10 recommendations of the review, to establish an independent Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission from 1 January 2019. I stand here today when I was to speak on this some three weeks ago. But of course this legislation was pushed off the agenda, pushed back a further three weeks, and we're going to try and establish a commission by 1 January 2019. It is October and the legislation is still in the House and is yet to go to the Senate.

In the context of recent public concern, the commission will be tasked with restoring confidence in the aged-care sector. It will create a single point of contact for all aged-care consumers and providers of aged care in relation to quality of care and regulation. But it will take an extraordinary effort by those opposite to see it formed by the projected date of 1 January 2019. The problem is that this government is too busy fighting within itself to focus on looking after older Australians. We have had five long years of watching inaction on that side. Their lack of action in relation to any reform in this space is disturbing. As the member for Bendigo outlined, we do not have a framework on which to measure the care that is being given. We have not done the hard work to reform aged care to ensure that we're getting quality, especially given that there are dozens of reviews and reports sitting on the minister's desk that have been blatantly ignored. Saying that the government has not acted in any regard would in fact be somewhat misleading. They have acted: they've slashed funding from the aged-care sector. There has been nothing but funding cuts over the past five years. It began in the 2014 budget with the dementia supplement cuts, which signalled the slide that we've now witnessed for five years. The current Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, has tried to deny it multiple times over the past couple of months, but in his first year alone as Treasurer he was responsible for cutting almost $2 billion from the aged-care sector.

The system is in crisis and those opposite need to take responsibility for it. I remember after the 2014 budget visiting one of the local not-for-profit aged-care facilities to hear how they were going to struggle without the dementia supplement, how they were concerned about the increasing number of dementia suffers with high needs, and how they were going to struggle to meet those residents' needs and they were going to struggle to explain to their families why that was the case. That was some time ago now, and they are still struggling.

The government values older Australians so little, it seems, that the minister for aged care is not included in cabinet. I would suggest that's a direct result of why this particular area has seen such savage cuts. It is deeply concerning that, in response to the aged-care crisis, the Liberal government have shown no compassion, just funding cuts. Inevitably, the result of these cuts is that the standard of care for older Australians has declined. We now have before us an agreement around a royal commission that is set to wind up in 2020. It is important that the royal commission shines a strong light on the quality, or lack thereof, in the system. It needs to look at the reasons for the appalling treatment occurring under current guidelines, legislation and the funding model. The commission should be given scope to look at the impacts of cuts and the changes to the ACFI on the current aged-care facility system. It should explore the impact of the lack of home-care packages and the subsequent impact in early entry into the aged-care system. It should look at the workforce, training and quality that has led to the outrageous practices that we have seen.

The other side of the aged-care system is the home care packages. Again, in this space we are seeing an absolute mess from this government. Time and time again, the lack of packages has been raised by the member for Franklin and many of us on this side in private members' business. Time and time again, we've complained about reports and data being held back as the numbers on the waiting lists rose. The home care package mess is another failure to add to the Liberals' record when it comes to the aged-care sector. It says a lot that the member for Cook, Scott Morrison, approved a multimillion-dollar taxpayer funded advertising campaign encouraging older Australians to access home care packages, whilst the waiting list for home care blew out to 121,000 people. The $8.2 million advertising campaign was the single biggest advertising spend in the 2018 budget. This campaign not only wasted millions of taxpayer dollars which could have been used to fund the home care packages but also gave older Australians false hope of their chance to accessing them.

What we know is that there are now 121,000 people waiting for home care packages. Of those people, 95,000 are waiting on the list with high-care needs, many with dementia. The blowout in the list means that older Australians are waiting, in some instances, more than two years before they can access a home care package that they have been approved for. The result means that people are going into aged-care facilities earlier than they would otherwise have needed to. This is irresponsible, not just in terms of quality; it's also financially irresponsible. We know about the cost blowouts as people enter aged care earlier than would have been necessary. This year's budget provided funding for a mere 14,000 packages over a four-year period. Three thousand five hundred packages per year is woefully inadequate when you consider that, in the past three months alone, the waiting list has grown by 13,000 people. While any money for the aged-care sector is welcomed, the provision of 14,000 packages over four years, when the waitlist is sitting at over 121,000, is disgraceful and says everything that is wrong with the policies of those opposite.

The issue raised by the member for Bendigo, thankfully, is around the workforce. The government is yet to commit to any funding to the Aged Care Workforce Strategy Taskforce. In the next 30 years, the aged-care workforce is expected to increase by 300 per cent, so we need to get this right now. The government's hands-off approach is failing not only the sector but older Australians who are reliant upon it. After they came into office in 2013, the Liberal government dumped Labor's $1.5 billion workforce compact and supplement. Labor will continue to advocate for a comprehensive workforce development strategy to address issues of training, staffing levels and an ageing workforce. The government is failing to ensure that the aged-care sector has staff that are adequately skilled and equipped to care for our rapidly ageing population.

That is not to diminish the work of the many carers and nurses I have met who work in this sector. To a large degree, those I have met are caring people. They are committed workers, tarred with an uncaring brush because of the images that we have seen on our television screens. I have met with aged-care workers and they have shared their stories about the real impact of funding cuts on the work they do. Their stories horrify the broader public—they do not meet the community's expectations. They speak of having little time to spend with residents, no time for conversation. There were tears when I met with workers in the western district. There were tears for how their role has changed and has impacted on the quality of life of the residents they care for. They talked of how heartbreaking it was not to be able to sit with someone while they drank their cup of tea. They spoke of the time pressures of having to get so many people out of bed and showered and dressed for the day. Aged care should not look like it is being institutionalised. Aged care should look like care.

The bills that are in front of us today will establish a commission that was called for 12 months ago. The royal commission will shine a light on things, but we know now what many of the issues are. We know that there are issues in terms of staff ratios. We know that there are issues in terms of the quality of care. These things need to be addressed immediately.

In contrast to the crisis caused by the Liberal government, Labor has a strong track record when it comes to ageing reform. In 2012, Labor introduced the Living Longer Living Better ageing reforms. In May this year, in fact in the budget reply, Bill Shorten said that an elected Labor government will make dementia and ageing national priorities, because it is the right thing to do—to make sure that older Australians have the dignity and respect that they deserve in aged care.

I know how often members on this side, and those opposite, are being contacted by people concerned about either the level of the home care package that they are likely to receive or the treatment of loved ones in aged-care facilities. I have heard many of those opposite raise these issues in this place, and I've also heard them come back and tell us how they had gotten ministerial intervention around a home care package for a level 3 or 4 resident in their community. Ministerial intervention is not good enough in this space. We need to act and we need to act now. Beyond the Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission, there needs to be action taken before we see the end of the royal commission. We cannot wait until it is concluded before we start implementing changes to fix this sector, which is in a state of crisis nationally. The government cannot ignore the situation any longer, as they have with previous inquiries.

Elderly Australians deserve to spend their twilight years in a dignified way. They deserve to have care in the institutions in which they are living. They deserve to have people working with them who care for them, who have time in their day, who are receiving a decent rate of pay and who have high-quality training. We need to increase the expectations for every—every!—facility to ensure that the quality of care that we would want for our own parents is being provided for every elderly Australian.

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