Clare O'Neil (Hotham, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Senior Australians and Aged Care Services) Share this | Hansard source

I will get to the MPI, but before I do I want to say something very brief about the opposition whip. As one of the previous speakers mentioned, this person has been instrumental in making many members on this side of the House able to do their jobs while they have had newborn children in Canberra. I am one of those people who really is just so grateful for Chris Hayes' support through having my two babies here in Canberra. In his entire work as whip, Chris has never made me feel like I have had to choose between looking after my baby and doing my job as a member of parliament, and I will be forever grateful for that. I will really miss you, Chris.

There are an awful lot of very important issues being discussed and debated in the parliament and around politics at the moment. Clearly, we have a crisis on foot about the treatment of women in this country and it's a challenge that we must face together as a country. But it is not the only challenge that we face. About 3½ weeks ago the royal commission made its final report into our aged-care system. What we must not allow in this parliament, and what I know Labor will not allow to happen, is for that report to gather dust on the desk of the Prime Minister, like the 21 reports into the aged-care system that he received before it. There is absolutely no question that we have an aged-care system today that is in crisis. If anyone was in any doubt about that we now have an eight volume royal commission, which details, in the most harrowing manner, the way in which older and senior Australians have been treated by this system. We have a system today that is so unbelievably contrary to our national values. I know a lot of people who have looked into or who have read this report cannot believe that the type of neglect that is outlined in these documents is happening in our country. It is shameful, it is rage inducing and it is heartbreaking that we have got to the point that we are at today.

The royal commission's eight volumes are a truly harrowing read. I want to highlight some of the things that I found most shocking when I read through that report. We have an aged-care system today in which two-thirds of the people who are living in residential aged care are malnourished or at risk of being malnourished. I want to make that point clear to the House. These people are under the care of the Australian government and two-thirds of them are not getting enough food to eat every day. That is the system over which the Morrison government presides today.

We heard that there are endemic problems with basic aspects of caring for older people. We heard about maggots and ants crawling through wounds. We heard about aged-care facilities that are rationing incontinence pads so older Australians are having to sit for hours in faeces and urine. We heard about the routine overmedication of older Australians. Sixty-one per cent of aged-care residents today are on some type of mind-altering psychotropic medication and the royal commission tells us that 10 per cent of these instances are actually medically justified. We learned that there are 50 sexual assaults a week happening in residential aged care, often the victims in these cases are the frailest, most elderly women who live in our country. Again, under the care of government this has been allowed to occur.

That is before we get onto the very pressing and urgent issues in home care. We know that most Australians would like to age in their own homes. Governments should facilitate that. Instead what we have today is a system that is rationed cruelly so that people who want to stay at home are being forced to wait years for the support they need. The system that this government presides over makes the frailest people, the people who need the most support, wait for the longest—for years. The tragic outcome of that is that over the last two years 28,000 Australians have died waiting for the support that this government has already told them that they need but will not provide. I don't think any other group in the Australian community would be treated this way. If this were happening to children this parliament would be shut down and we would be marching in the street. I think when we look at the system today what we see is pure and simple age discrimination and it has to end.

I want to very quickly share a story that was very generously talked about by the member for Canberra today of an experience that her family had with this system because I think it so well demonstrates many stories that millions of people around this country have. The member for Canberra's grandmother had dementia and she lived in an aged-care facility. There were eight residents living in close quarters. There was one person who was staffed to assist those eight people who were very unwell with dementia. Anyone in this House who has had experience with dementia would know it can be very challenging. That one person perhaps could have dealt with those eight people at certain periods of time, but that one person was expected to feed those eight people at every meal. That one person was not able to do that, and so the food that would be laid down in front of these unwell dementia patients would be taken away uneaten. We heard how the member for Canberra's mother would go to the facility once, often twice, a day just to ensure that her mother was getting enough food to eat. How can this be happening in Australia? It's happening right now in every one of our communities to the people that we love and to the people that deserve better.

The people who are victims of this absolutely broken system are not just older Australians and their families. I want to speak a little bit about the staff—the hundreds of thousands of people who come into this sector simply because they want to provide care to older people who need their support. These people are our national heroes. They're doing some of the most important work in the community. They're there, holding the hands of older people as their life ends. We know today that these people are fundamentally and profoundly mistreated by this system. How we repay them for the important work that they're doing is by making them some of the poorest paid people in the whole community. You can literally earn more stacking shelves in Woolworths today than you can earn looking after a very, very sick person in the final stages of their life. That is wrong. It is just unmitigatedly, absolutely, 100 per cent wrong.

It's not just about the pay they get. The people who work in this sector are subject to rampant casualisation in a working environment where there's no real incentive or opportunities for them to get properly trained up. The worse thing that we are making these people do is care and work in a way that they don't want to work. They came into this sector to provide care for older Australians and, because staffing levels are so low, we are making them make heartbreaking choices every day about the people who they will care for and the people they do not have time to care for. Many people won't realise this, but there are no minimum staffing requirements in aged care today. None. We have minimum staffing requirements for child care, hospitals and schools, and yet for older people, nothing. That's how you end up with situations like that described by the member for Canberra.

When I talked to staff who were working in this sector, they talked to me about coming home from work traumatised. They actually can't speak to their family for a period of time when they get home, because of the decisions they have had to make between looking after a person groaning with pain or trying to help someone eat who has lost dramatic amounts of weight since they've gone into aged care. People should not have to make those choices. We should have a system, which gives people and the people who work for them dignity in what they do. We just need to show them little a more respect.

How did we end up here? The Prime Minister has, I think, in a very routine manner, run from the things he's directly responsible for we. We see that every day in this chamber, and aged care is no different. The fact that we have as situation that's in crisis hasn't happened by accident. While the Prime Minister was Treasurer of this country, he oversaw vicious cuts to this sector. More than $1.7 billion was cut over a period of 2015-17.

Only the Liberals could savagely cut a sector like this and then turn around and look surprised when standards have slipped so badly. We do see that when we look at what has happened in aged care funding over time. I'm sure those on the other side of the House will get up and talk about how aged-care funding is going up year on year. Well, of course it's going up—we've got an ageing population. The Morrison government is the first government that has seen that big shift of baby boomers start to come into the system. What matters is how people are being treated per capita. What we know is that funding is going down. As a share of people over the age of 70, we know that funding is going down for the people who are receiving home-care services under this government.

Let's not mince our words here. We've got a government that has cut funding to this sector and that has had seven aged care ministers in eight years. They have neglected the people who live in aged care. They have neglected this issue as an important issue that faces the government. The question I have for the government—I'm glad to see the minister at the table here—is why, when they have been so much a part of breaking this system, would we ever trust them to fix it?

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