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

As speakers before me have said, the Aged Care Legislation Amendment (Serious Incident Response Scheme and Other Measures) Bill 2020 is legislation that has been some time coming. We know that work had been done before 2017 and that at least two reports were published in 2017 recommending the enacting of a serious incident response scheme. We know that the Australian Law Reform Commission, in its report Elder abuse, recommended that an SIRS be introduced. We know that the Carnell-Paterson review when it was looking at the Oakden facility recommended such legislation. We know that in the 2019-20 budget the government put forward some money to prepare for an SIRS. But it still took some time before this legislation made its way into this parliament. It is of course welcome that it is here now. But no-one in this place and no-one in any of the communities that we represent can say anything other than that we have an aged-care system which is currently broken. Start with the fact that an interim report of a royal commission can be titled Neglect. Then go to the experiences of the mothers, fathers and grandparents across our communities who are in aged-care facilities. The people who work there want to do the best that they can and are dedicated to caring for the people who reside there, but they're hamstrung by the fact that there aren't enough staff from shift to shift. They're hamstrung by the fact that it can be very hard to recruit staff when wages are so low. They're hamstrung by the fact that work in aged care is now so casualised, so precarious that we have people working across three and four different facilities in order to make ends meet.

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