Peta Murphy (Dunkley, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to contribute to the debate on the Aged Care Legislation Amendment (Serious Incident Response Scheme and Other Measures) Bill 2020. Speakers on this side of the House before me raised as one of the concerns about this bill that it doesn't cover in-home care. I just wanted to raise another concern that has been raised with me in my electorate, which is one that I'm sure the government will take note of and work to make sure is addressed before aged-care facilities are asked to implement this new scheme—that is, making sure that there is certainty about how the scheme is to be applied and the sorts of serious incidents it covers.

It's been raised with me that the current documentation available on the departmental website has some ambiguities about 'neglect', 'intentional' and 'recklessness'. It is the case that there are a number of incidents in aged-care facilities that result in serious injury that don't fall into the categories of neglect or intention or recklessness but are accidents. It has been raised by many who are concerned about there being guidance, because people who work in aged care want this guidance so they can make sure that they are giving the best care where they can, they are reporting incidents where it's appropriate and they are not taking up a lot of time and scarce resources when it's actually not necessary for them to report incidents. It's not a criticism of the legislation but simply a concern that has been raised with me that I wanted to put before this House so that the government can consider it. Of course, I would be very happy to forward more details of that concern to the minister if the minister is interested.

I turn to the second reading amendment and to the fact that the Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety not only shone a light on many of these serious incidents that need to be addressed but also, more than that, shone a light on how badly neglected and underfunded the aged-care system is and has been for some time. It is something that should cause shame to all of us to have an interim report that says:

Many people receiving aged care services have their basic human rights denied. Their dignity is not respected and their identity is ignored. … It is a shocking tale of neglect.

We had an aged-care royal commission in this country because our communities would no longer accept this neglect of their loved ones; because our aged-care workers would no longer be silent about the way-too-low wages, poor conditions; and because precarious employment often prevents them providing the care that they want to while living the sorts of lives they should be able to live; and because brave Australians from across the country wanted their voices to be heard. It is to those people and everyone who joined the campaign to force this government to finally call a royal commission whom we owe our thanks.

The interim report of the royal commission—and the hundreds of thousands of Australians who wanted their voices heard and who wanted the aged-care system fixed—was released last year before hundreds and hundreds of Australians died from COVID while in residential aged care, on the Morrison government's watch. In the stark words of Peter Rozen QC, senior counsel assisting the royal commission into aged care, the evidence would reveal that neither the Commonwealth Department of Health nor the aged-care regulator developed a COVID-19 plan specifically for the aged-care sector.

It was in August last year that the leader of the Labor Party—the member for Grayndler—stood at the Press Club and, in the absence of a government plan, offered eight points for the government to consider, which included minimum staffing levels in residential aged care and reducing the home-care package waiting list so more people can stay in their homes for longer, because we still have over 100,000 Australians approved for residential home care waiting for their packages, and the Department of Health says that more than half of them are eligible for the highest level of care.

Ensure transparency and accountability of funding to support high-quality care: it should be the case that aged-care providers who receive taxpayers' money have to acquit how they spend it and how they spend it on care for the people that are in their facilities. There should be independent measurement and public reporting, as recommended by the royal commission.

Every residential aged-care facility should have adequate personal protective equipment and better training for staff, including but certainly not limited to infection control, and a better surge workforce strategy. And, in August of last year, the Leader of the Opposition's recommendation was that additional resources go to the aged-care royal commission so that they could inquire into COVID-19 across the sector but not impact or delay the handing down of the final report. We've seen little willingness from the current government to adopt any of those minimum and sensible recommendations.

I know that the people of Dunkley have had enough. They tell me over and over again that action needs to be taken on aged care, because they know we didn't have a royal commission because this Prime Minister or this government wanted one. They know that we had a royal commission because eventually the Prime Minister and the government realised that they had no choice. In less than a month, the Prime Minister and the government are also going to be put in a position where they're not going to have a choice, because the royal commission is going to hand down its final findings and recommendations, and this government cannot simply stand up and say: 'Sure. We accept that,' and think that that will be enough.

What Australians expect and deserve is a government that will implement reforms swiftly and will fund them without reservation. After seven years of presiding over systemic and ongoing failures in Australia's aged-care system, this Liberal government cannot continue to deny responsibility, it cannot underfund the system and it cannot pretend that the serious and shameful problems don't exist. When we have royal commissioners who say, 'Had the Australian government acted upon previous reviews of aged care, the persistent problems in aged care would have been known much earlier and the suffering of many people could have been avoided,' then there is no excuse not to act. We cannot have a government that continues to put 'bandaid fixes on the run'. It is not good enough. And that's not my phrase—'bandaid fixes on the run'; that's the royal commission's phrase in its interim report, titled Neglect. It is an abrogation of one of the most fundamental responsibilities of government—to care for those who can't care for themselves, to protect Australians when they face dangers which they can't defend themselves from and to be on their citizens' side. Australians expect that they're entitled to the best quality level of care in aged-care homes, and the royal commission has been clear that more is needed to enable providers to meet those expectations consistently—more funding.

I also challenge the Morrison government. Here are some other things that are needed to help ensure Australian citizens get their expectations met in aged-care homes consistently: acknowledge not only what you want praise for, but where you have failed and take responsibility for fixing it; fund the system properly, because if we can't do it now when can we do it; address the pay and the conditions of workers and minimum staffing levels for the sake of the workers and for the sake of the people that they've dedicated their working lives to care for.

It is not too much to ask of an Australian government that it ensures senior Australians have dignity and meaning in their later years no matter how many resources they have available to them and no matter what their personal wealth is. What Australians need now is a federal government that demonstrates through actions and outcomes, not announcements and spin, that it is truly on their side. I challenge the Morrison government to be that. But I can tell you this: a federal Labor government will be that and will be on the side of all Australians. The people in Dunkley know that I will continue to stand up in this place at every opportunity I get to say we have to fix our broken aged-care system for the sake not only of the people who are there now but also of people in the future.

I want to end this contribution by raising a positive example of an aged-care facility. We do hear a lot about where things go wrong, and that does have to be fixed, but we have to also mention the facilities that are great and where things are going well. The Village Baxter in my electorate—I know that Kim Jackson will be slightly embarrassed that I am praising her and her staff so publicly in the parliament, but they deserve to be praised—is a facility that sat down at the start of last year, before the federal government had taken steps to deal with the pandemic, and said, 'It looks like we've got an issue. How can we make sure we're prepared for it?' They took out their old sales plan and their infection control plan. They talked with their residents. Before masks were mandatory they had staff and medical staff wearing masks. They educated their wider community about what was required to keep their residents safe. They did an amazing job in the face of the same difficulties that staff and facilities across Victoria and across Australia did and they did it well, and I want to make sure that they are remembered for how well they did it. As Kim has said to me, aged-care is about people. Our approach, as with everything we do, must value those people at the centre of every decision. That is a guiding principle that works for aged care, and it's a guiding principle that should be adopted by governments and would work for governments: people should be at the heart of every decision. In a year when Australians fought fires, floods and, as Kim Jackson has said to me, microscopic enemies that we couldn't see, we needed to make sure that we learnt from that that people should be at the heart of every decision.

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