Andrew Wallace (Fisher, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission Bill 2018.

Older Australians deserve a comfortable and a dignified retirement. The current generation of older residents of my electorate of Fisher literally built our modern Sunshine Coast and the Australian community, transforming what was a quiet and sparsely populated rural area in the years after last century's wars into today's thriving, economically diverse region, filled with opportunity. Across the country, there are 1.3 million older Australians who receive aged-care services. This issue is of particular importance to my community. In Fisher, we have more than 26,000 residents who are over the age of 65, and we have more than 30 aged-care facilities and services.

Debate on this bill is extremely timely. The need for an Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission has never been clearer. At the end of September, The Courier-Mail reported that assaults and rapes of nursing home residents rose by a third last year to a record 3,773. That represents one such assault for every 55 occupants of residential aged care. Those statistics are truly shocking. There was also a 31 per cent rise in aged-care operators reporting residents missing in 2017-18, representing a fundamental failure of their duty of care. As a result of the stepped-up audits conducted at the Minister for Aged Care's request following the Oakden tragedy, the Aged Care Quality Agency has identified 61 homes which were considered a serious risk to residents' health and safety in 2017-18. That's 177 per cent more than last year. The Aged Care Quality Agency was forced to shut down 12 homes and sanction a further 26. In total, 209 nursing homes failed this year's quality audit.

These statistics were illustrated very starkly in the recent Four Corners programs. Alongside the harrowing footage, the testimony from people working in care homes themselves was deeply concerning. Tony Northcote, a consultant of 12 years experience, said:

It's regular, if you're on a night shift as a registered nurse, to be in charge of 100, 120, 150 people …

…   …   …

… I found that over 60 per cent of their bed-bound residents had forms of pressure injuries. 90 per cent of the residents that are incontinent had rashes.

Katrina Legzdins, an enrolled nurse, told the program:

Some people get really depressed, and you have a resident saying, 'Can you give me a pill to kill me?'

They just want to die, and you don't have five minutes to spend sitting there with them.

She added:

You walk out there knowing that the residents deserve better than what you can give them.

Rebecca De Haan, a personal carer of 10 years experience, said:

There were people that were in bed that needed to be fully fed, they couldn't feed themselves at all, and you'd see staff members just quickly going to offer the resident a bit of food. If they didn't take it immediately, [the staff would] just go out and ditch the lunch. And that was really common. You can see these people are so hungry.

The impact on the mental health of staff who work in aged-care residences which do not meet the required standards can also be serious. Once again, the testimony of aged-care workers on Four Corners was distressing to hear. Tanya Bosch, a personal care assistant, said:

It was the most exhausting, confronting, distressing job I've ever had. It was really frustrating to know that on a daily basis, you were failing to meet the needs of some of the most vulnerable people in our society.

…   …   …

… it's just heartbreaking to have to walk away from someone who just wants a bit of kindness and a little bit of a chat.

Troy Mann, a personal carer, said:

I suffered a mental breakdown because of it. I put myself in the residents' shoes. I thought to myself: 'Would I be happy in their position?'

This experience is known as 'moral distress'. It results from care workers feeling helpless in the face of structures which prevent them from taking the course of action they believe is right. A study presented at the American Psychological Association convention in 2014 found that 97 per cent of aged-care workers have experienced moral distress in the workplace, with 47 per cent considering resigning. One in five have taken time off work as a result of these feelings. Associate Professor Denise Jepsen of Macquarie University has said that 50 per cent of home care workers she's interviewed report that they currently suffer or recently suffered from anxiety or depression. The consequences of failures in the processes, practices and structures of aged-care providers are not limited to the harm done to consumers of the services. They also extend to those workers who already do one of society's most emotionally challenging jobs.

For our part, the government have demonstrated significant commitment to providing older Australians with access to care that supports their dignity and recognises the contribution that they have made to our society. Funding for aged care under our government is at record levels. In 2017-18 the government spent $18.6 billion, while over the next five years funding will grow by a further $5 billion. This has helped to support an extra 140 aged-care placements in my electorate of Fisher. We've also invested $1.6 billion to create an additional 20,000 home care packages and allocated $50 million a year for dementia-specific programs.

However, it is clear that in too many cases this additional funding is not delivering the standard of care for older Australians that they so rightly deserve. The Prime Minister should be commended for his decision, in response to recent revelations, to set up the Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety. The royal commission will give us a chance to go beyond the cases highlighted by the two previous parliamentary inquiries and those described in recent media stories, and conduct a fundamental review of all parts of this sector. It will also give us the opportunity to take a wider view and consider what the future of aged care should look like in Australia.

However, that does not mean that we do not need immediate action. We cannot afford to wait more than a year to begin to turn this ship around. That is why the Minister for Senior Australians and Aged Care already asked for increased inspections and compliance activities from the existing Aged Care Quality Agency, resulting in a non-compliant facility being shut down every month this year. The immediate action we now need has two parts. The first is a new set of aged-care quality standards unified across the sector and focused on the needs of consumers so that everyone in the system—providers, users, employees and families—knows just what to expect. We legislated these this year under the Aged Care (Single Quality Framework) Reform Bill 2018. The second step is the bill before us today. Just as it recreated the Australian Building and Construction Commission to enforce the new Building Code and get tough with the bad behaviour of unions, so is the Morrison government creating an Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission to enforce the new Aged Care Quality Standards and get tough with aged-care providers who are doing the wrong thing.

The bill before us will establish the Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission, which will provide a single point of contact for aged-care consumers, their families and providers of aged-care services to deal with issues of quality and regulation. It will comprehensively cover all parts of the sector, including residential care, home care, and flexible care services. A single commission will be responsible for accreditation and approval of providers, reviews of quality, monitoring of services, and complaints handling, giving the commission all of the levers it needs to ensure appropriate compliance. But the commission will go beyond enforcing compliance; it will help to improve the sector itself and the public's engagement with it. The commission will be responsible for working with consumers and industry leaders to develop best-practice models in delivering aged care and then disseminating them among providers. The commission will also be responsible for helping to provide information on aged care to consumers, their families and the wider public to build confidence in the reformed system and to help them to understand how to engage with it. Through all of this we will properly resource the new commission, with $106 million allocated in the 2018 budget.

Neglect and abuse in the aged-care sector needs to stop. We must have no more stories like those we all heard on Four Corners. The royal commission announced by the Prime Minister will get to the bottom of what needs to be done. In the meantime, this bill will create the tough new cop on the beat that will take what the royal commission has to say and make sure the aged-care sector listens.

Just as a government cannot cure all ill in our society, as the member for Forrest said in her speech, there must be recognition of responsibility among us as families of people living in aged care. I recently had the aged-care minister come to my electorate of Fisher. He was talking about the number of people in aged care who do not get a visitor at all for over 12 months. I appreciate that some families may be geographically located away from their loved ones in aged care, but for some people not to have received a visitor for 12 months is a blight on our society.

Once upon a time, our community—and, in fact, many communities in Europe—looked after their old. I'm addressing this to the young people in the gallery: once upon a time, we looked after our aged in our own homes. With the advent of modern society, that is becoming increasingly more difficult, as we all—both men and women, or couples—work. But we've got to take greater responsibility for our family, for our loved ones. The Europeans would look after their aged relatives—and still do, so much better than we do in this country.

And it falls upon us, as a community, to try and take a leaf out of their book, as best we possibly can, to ensure that our loved ones are appropriately cared for in their own homes, or our homes, or—in the worst-case scenario—in an aged-care facility. But if people are living in an aged-care facility then for God's sake visit them. Some of the loneliest people I've ever met are those living in aged-care facilities.

There's a place here for our community groups to offer the kind of friendship and love that some are missing out on in aged-care facilities, by just sitting down and talking to an older person and holding their hand. And it's not charity. The gift that they will give you—the gift of their stories—is priceless. So I'm calling upon all Australians to do their bit: even if it's not your family member, go to an aged-care facility and spend some time with a resident. You won't forget it.

See this speech in context