David Gillespie (Lyne, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

I second the motion. Aged care is one of the most important social services that the nation has a responsibility for, and the Morrison and McCormack government is certainly stepping up to the mark to deliver the reforms and the extra funding required to give the quality and safety of service that has, unfortunately, in some areas of the aged-care system been lacking. You only have to look at Oakden. I can't think of a strong enough word—not a debacle but a major disappointment and a failure of quality and standards.

The Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety was commissioned by Prime Minister Morrison. It was one of his first major decisions as Prime Minister. As a result, we have had an intense focus on the area of government supervision of the actual system, which is very extensive. In my area of the country, the Lyne electorate, we have some of the largest numbers, per electorate, of people who require aged care, and we have had a massive expansion in services. But, getting back to this particular issue, just last week we announced a package of $496 million for an additional 10,000 home care places. But that isn't the only increase. When we were first put on the government benches, in 2013, there were only 60,300 home care places. That number went up to 125,119 places in 2018 and 2019, and this recent increase of 10,000 places will be well used.

One of the other things that have been identified by the royal commission is the overuse of chemical restraint. For those people who don't understand what chemical restraint means: it means using drugs to calm down anxious or aggressive people. Unfortunately, with dementia some people do become quite aggressive, agitated and distressed, and chemical restraint is part of the lexicon of manoeuvres to manage a person in that distressed state. But the royal commission found that there has been an overuse of it, so there will be new regulations stating that a second doctor has to provide an overview, after a certain period of time, of the long-term use of the drugs.

We've also got a $10 million commitment to additional dementia training and support for aged-care workers and providers, and we are using $25 million to involve professional bodies, such as the professional pharmacists association. The new guidelines, which involve getting a second look by a separate practitioner at the requirement for a chemical restraint, will mean we won't have people on these drugs ad infinitum—the drug is prescribed once and then never ceased.

One of the other problems identified by the royal commission is that increasingly, when young people who have disability need specialised accommodation, they end up by default in the aged-care system. It is very soul-destroying for a young person to be surrounded by people who they feel are at the other end of the spectrum, even though they themselves need a lot of physical support. They are embedded in an aged-care facility where there are people with high care needs, a lot of whom have dementia. That is the community that they're locked in with, and it doesn't help them with their recovery or their physical wellbeing.

So, in this latest package, we have also invested $4.7 million towards meeting new targets for removing younger people from aged care. We're also providing simpler aged-care assessment methods that need to be done. Aged-care assessment either puts people into a home care package or, at the other end of the spectrum, recommends residential aged care. The whole of residential aged care has had an increase of over $1.2 billion per year, year after year, over the last seven years of coalition governments. In 2012-13, the total funding was $13.3 billion. It is now up to $21.7 billion and will be at $25.4 billion by the end of 2022-23. (Time expired)

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