Julie Owens (Parramatta, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Citizenship and Multicultural Australia) Share this | Hansard source

We were all horrified at the appalling record of abuse of elderly in care in nursing homes. It's a full-blown crisis, as Four Corners demonstrated all too clearly, and Australians are rightly appalled by the shocking stories we've seen and the crisis in our nation's aged-care system—particularly by the standard of care being delivered in some of our nursing homes. One of the worst in the country is actually in my electorate of Parramatta. But we shouldn't actually be surprised by what we saw on Four Corners, because the warning signs have been there for quite some time. There have been reports that have languished on ministers' desks. The Labor opposition called for investigation and action quite some time ago and said that the sector was in crisis. The signs have been there, and it's clear that the government has not acted on those signs. It's clear that, in many nursing homes across the country, the standard that we all expect is not being met.

So Labor is supporting these bills. The purpose of the Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission Bill 2018 is to establish a new aged-care quality and safety commission from 1 January 2019. The new commission will be tasked with helping to restore the confidence of aged-care consumers in the delivery of aged-care services, given the context of recent public concern. It does become essentially a one-stop shop. The new commission will provide a single point of contact for aged-care consumers and providers of aged care in relation to quality of care and regulation and will be responsible for accreditation, assessment and monitoring, and complaints handling of aged-care services and Commonwealth-funded aged-care services. That covers all four areas of aged-care services, including residential aged care, home care, flexible care services, the Commonwealth Home Support Program and the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Flexible Aged Care Program. So it is a one-stop shop and it is a significant move to address some of the many problems we have in the sector.

There is a well-known growing need in the aged-care sector, something that we've known about for a long time. We've known for a long time that our population is ageing. Even back in the Howard-Costello years we had reports from the Treasurer on the ageing of the Australian population. An ageing policy is a rapidly changing environment and it's been driven essentially by the Living Longer Living Better reforms delivered by Labor in 2012. Those reforms were designed to deliver important benefits to older Australians, including more support and care at home, better access to residential care, increased recognition of carers and those from culturally diverse backgrounds, more support for those with dementia and better access to information.

I remember those years leading to 2012 when we engaged in the consultation with our many diverse communities, who all have different attitudes to how they support their families as they age and their partners as they age. For many of our communities—and the member for Chifley would know this quite well—the idea of putting a parent into a nursing home is just not an option. It's so far beyond their cultural understanding of support for their parents and their partners. So, provision of home care and culturally-appropriate home care was incredibly important at that time, and it was very well received.

They were really important reforms, because we also know, if you think about it, that what the person wants for themselves and what is best for them and their families, which is to stay at home as long as they can, is also, strangely, cheaper. It's better for everybody. Renovating a bathroom so that a person can get in and out of a shower or a bath, installing a winch so that a person can assist their partner get in and out of bed—these things are relatively inexpensive and allow a person to stay at home. And they're incredibly inexpensive relative to the alternative, which is putting a person in a nursing home or having people come daily to assist. So there are lots of options.

The Living Longer Living Better reforms were designed to provide that flexibility so that families, with all their cultural differences and all their different capacities and needs, could make the decisions that were best for them. The main focus was about consumer directed care that would give older Australians greater choice about the care they wanted but the independence and support to live in their homes for as long as possible, preferably until they passed away. The aged-care reform package provided $3.7 billion over five years. It was legislated in June 2013, three months before the Abbott government was elected.

We know how important it is, because 1.3 million Australians are currently receiving some form of aged care provided by 400,000 nurses and carers. And by 2056, which is getting closer by the day, it's projected that the aged-care workforce will need to triple to around one million workers required to deliver services for more than 3.5 million people, and older people will represent one in four Australians. Public expenditure on aged care is expected to double as a share of the economy by the 2050s. We've known this for some time. This is not new information. We have known for a long time that we need to work hard and consistently on making sure we have the appropriate aged-care system in place for our ageing population.

The government have been really quite inept over the last five years. They don't have a minister for ageing and aged care in the cabinet, for example. Given that we're talking about a quarter of the budget within 30 years, given that we're talking about one in four Australians being in aged care within just 30 years, that is quite remarkable. They've had three aged-care ministers across the Abbott-Turnbull-Morrison government, and their carriage of the reforms for the past five years have failed to do anything, in any real way, across the Ageing portfolio.

The former health minister, Sussan Ley, did little or nothing to progress the Living Longer Living Better reforms. What she and Tony Abbott will be remembered for is cutting billions from aged care and dumping Labor's $1.5 billion workforce compact, even though we know we're going to need hundreds of thousands more aged-care workers over the next 10 to 30 years. More than a dozen reviews and reports, including hundreds of recommendations, are still sitting on the minister's desk without being actioned. The government has cherrypicked its way through some of the recommendations but has done little or nothing to drive long-term reform, and any changes it's making are piecemeal in nature. Now that it is acting, we know that it's acting in response to a crisis brought on by the public sector.

Many years ago, when I was in my late 20s, I was a great fan of an old Chinese book called Bing Faor The Art of War. It was written by a group of Chinese philosophers but is credited to a man called Sun Tzu. It forms a foundation for a lot of business strategy right through the Asian region. I had about seven translations in my early 20s. It's a phenomenal book. A lot of people misunderstand it. Essentially, it says that the greatest generals are the ones you've never heard of, because they manage not to go to war. They manage to avoid war. The greatest doctors don't have sick patients. You've never heard of them, because the patients don't get sick. If a person lets a problem get to a point it's visible, they've already failed. So the ones known for presiding over the rise of a problem and then solving it are not the ones you should really be praising—they're the ones you've never heard of.

I look at this government sometimes and I watch it do almost the opposite. The idea that this government would see a problem coming and act early to avoid it, to minimise its effects, to make it go away—I don't think they're capable of it. It's as if every time they act it's because they've let the problem get so big that everyone can see it. And, once everyone can see it, they act on it and seek credit for the solution. It's completely the opposite to what a great leader does, it's completely the opposite to what a nation needs, and it's certainly the opposite to what all those people in aged care needed when they were being treated the way the Four Corners report showed.

The extraordinary growth in the number of older Australians waiting for care underscores the coalition's complete inaction and failure to address the crisis in our aged-care system. As the list gets longer and longer, fresh stories emerge daily of older Australians waiting for care, particularly in the all-important home care area, which keeps people home with their families as long as possible. It's incredibly important and the choice that most Australians would make. None of us are saying: 'Woo hoo! I'm looking forward to going into an aged-care facility.' None of us are doing that. We all want to stay home as long as possible, and home care allows that. But older Australians are entering residential care, or even emergency departments, rather than staying at home and receiving the home care they were approved for, because the waiting list is so long. Since the first release of data, the waiting list for home care has grown from 88,000 older Australians to more than 121,000, and it includes around 96,000 older Australians with high needs, many with dementia, and around 56,000 older Australians who have no home care package at all.

In the budget, the government announced with fanfare the funding of 14,000 new in-home care packages over four years. I want to break that number down. That's about 3½ thousand places a year. We have 150 electorates. If you assumed—quite wrongly, but probably quite reasonably—that each electorate had roughly the same number of people who were over the age of 70, you would be talking about 23 places per year per electorate. In Parramatta we have 12,300 people over the age of 70. It's inconceivable that the number of new places required in my electorate per year would be 23, when I have nearly 12½ thousand people over the age of 70. Many of those people are in communities where it would be inconceivable for a person to put their parent in an aged-care facility. Home care is actually the necessary solution in order for them to live within their cultural norms and, essentially, sleep at night. So that was an amazing announcement that the government made with such fanfare. We also know, by the way, that they funded it by taking money from residential aged care. We've seen, instead, the waiting list grow, and it will continue to grow until the government take this seriously.

I don't have the figures for the electorate of Parramatta itself, but I do have them for Western Sydney. As at 31 March, there were 2,160 people in home care packages in Western Sydney, and in June this year there were 968 people in the prioritisation queue who had not been assigned even a lower level package. They hadn't been assigned anything. So we had close to a thousand people in the queue in Western Sydney in June 2018. There were 492 home care packages released in the June quarter, but we had 968 people on the prioritisation list—and that's not counting the people who are not in the prioritisation queue. So there's no way in the world that what this government is doing is keeping up with what is actually required.

We on this side of the House support the royal commission into the abuse and cover-ups in the aged-care sector, but we want to stress again that we've been saying for quite some time that there is a crisis. And we want to point out again that the government mustn't wait for the royal commission to finish before they start fixing this crisis. The Abbott-Turnbull-Morrison government cut $1.2 billion from aged care. The former Treasurer, Mr Morrison, cut $1.2 billion from aged care in the first budget, and he cut residential aged-care places in this year's budget. He called this cut—$1.2 billion from aged care—and further cuts to residential aged-care places 'efficiencies'. Well, they are not efficiencies for the families whose loved ones are being treated the way we saw on Four Corners. These aren't efficiencies; this is horrific for families who know that they have no other alternative but to have their parent or their partner in an aged-care facility and know that every day they are being treated in that way. Families are justified to have deep concerns about the quality of care being delivered in residential aged-care facilities for their loved ones, and they saw it proven on Four Corners.

Prime Minister Morrison is characterising his $1.2 billion cut to aged care as a little fact. That's an insult to every older Australian who relies on care. This Prime Minister, when he was Treasurer, actually cut the per resident funding for aged care. Every time he tries to talk about the numbers and says, 'It's more money,' remember that there are more older people. The key here is that he cut the per resident funding for aged care. Each person in an aged-care facility gets less funding per person than they did before this man became Treasurer. Of course the budget grows; it has to grow. The number of older people is growing and the number of people in aged care is growing, but they get less per person, thanks to this government, than they did before. That is the thing to remember when you worry about your family. When you worry about your loved ones in aged-care facilities, just remember that: less money per person under this government. (Time expired)

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