Pat Conroy (Shortland, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for International Development and the Pacific) Share this | Hansard source

I welcome the opportunity to make a contribution on the Aged Care and Other Legislation Amendment (Royal Commission Response No. 2) Bill. The electorate of Shortland, which I have the privilege of representing in this place, is the sixth-oldest electorate in Australia. Aged care, both residential and home based, matters to my constituents, and they know that they have been let down by the Liberals and Nationals over the last eight years. The pandemic has revealed failures of the system and, shockingly, 766 of our fellow Australians have died in aged care over the past 18 months. This is a damning indictment on the coalition's management of aged care.

This bill would amend the Aged Care Act 1997 to require all approved aged-care providers to always have at least one registered nurse on duty. That would seem like a no-brainer to many Australians. While this was a recommendation from the royal commission that the government accepted, so far the government has only committed to requiring a registered nurse to be on site at residential facilities for 16 hours a day. This is the classic marketing approach we expect from the man who leads this government and his pathetic excuse for a minister for senior Australians—a big announcement accepting the royal commission's recommendations but then in practice not following up. This is another clear example of the government's 'all announcement, no delivery' style of government, and they are consciously and willingly misleading elderly Australians that I represent in this place. In speaking on this bill relating to the government's response to the aged-care royal commission, I want to highlight some facts and figures that will be deeply uncomfortable for the government, or they should be.

Fact 1: the Prime Minister's changes to the Aged Care Funding Instrument between 2016 and 2021 has led to a gap in funding of between $2.1 billion and $2.5 billion from what the total funding position would otherwise have been. The key point here is that, because of the decisions of the Prime Minister when he was Treasurer, billions of dollars have been stripped away from the aged-care system over the past four years. And, for the record, this figure is based on analysis from the independent Parliamentary Budget Office. I say to the Prime Minister: these cuts have consequences, and we have seen vividly, in the deaths of hundreds of Australians, what the results of cutting funding to aged care are. Some may find this offensive. Well, what I find offensive is the very real risk that thousands of my elderly constituents will not receive the care and attention they deserve because of budgetary decisions of this government.

Fact 2: the aged-care sector is facing a massive workforce shortage in the coming years. In reference to the bill we are debating, there will be no capacity to respond to the royal commission's recommendations as the sector is 110,000 workers short of what they need. This figure comes from the Committee for Economic Development of Australia and their chief economist, Jarrod Ball, who recently said:

We will need at least 17,000 more direct aged-care workers each year in the next decade just to meet basic standards of care.

Let me repeat that: 110,000 extra aged-care workers will be needed just to meet basic standards of care, let alone responding to the horrifying neglect the royal commission revealed.

The truth is I have had the privilege of meeting with many aged-care workers, and they are passionate about what they do. They love what they do. They do it because they can have a meaningful impact on the lives of many senior Australians. But, whenever I talk to them about it, they say they find it so frustrating because, as they point out—and I have met with aged-care workers who have been in the industry for over 20 years—they could get a job at Bunnings and earn more than they do looking after some of the most vulnerable Australians in this country. That's unacceptable—that you could earn more at Bunnings than in looking after elderly Australians. They also make the point that there is very little capacity for training and skills development; there's a real lack of capacity for portability of skills and leave entitlements, which is really important given so many of these workers are casual; and there's a real variation in their employers' attitudes towards things like training to lifting equipment to quality care for their residents. So, if we are to provide a better quality aged care for Australians, and I passionately believe that we should be doing that, we need to address the workforce issues first and foremost.

Fact 3: also affecting aged care is the current intention of the Morrison government to privatise aged-care assessments. This isn't surprising; privatisation is something that's in the Liberals' DNA, and we should not forget that it was the Howard government that made very significant changes to aged care, bringing the private sector into aged care, which has led to the situation we face today. The Liberals' obsession with neoliberal economics and their cruel embrace of free-market economics at the expense of human dignity is not how Australians expect the elderly to be treated—as commodities—but that's what we see more and more with this government.

In speaking on this bill regarding the royal commission, I want to highlight that privatising aged-care assessments was not a recommendation of the royal commission and attempts by the government to do this have been condemned by the Australian Medical Association. The AMA President, Omar Khorshid, said last month, 'A market-based approach is a recipe for aged-care service providers to put profits before patients.' And we saw that during the pandemic, where the vast majority of the deaths in aged-care homes occurred at privately owned facilities, and the previous Labor speaker talked about Maserati-driving aged-care-home owners who were often delivering the worst possible care for their residents. I say to my constituents, particularly the elderly ones: I will continue to fight any move to privatise aged-care assessments, because it is the thin edge of the wedge that will just impose a greater profit motive in the sector.

Another problem in the aged-care sector is the long waiting list for home-care packages. For example, there's the case of Helen from Redhead. Helen's family came to my office at Saint Temple last year seeking assistance. Her home-care package had been approved to be upgraded from level 2 to level 3, and she was told that she'd been placed on a national priority system but that there was a waiting time of one year. The government was accurate in that forecast: her funding for the increase has just been approved one year later. So I say to this government: you can brag about how much you're spending, but when you're consciously holding back packages that you've promised to save money, you're doing a grave disservice to older Australians. The fact that we have a waiting list of over 100,000 Australians, who've been assessed by ACAT as being eligible for a home-care package but haven't received funding, is a disgrace and an assault on elderly Australians.

Another assault on elderly Australians is what's occurring in the home modification part of the aged-care sector. This must be a priority—the three tiers of aged care: home modifications is the first step. The second is home-care packages, and the third is residential aged care. The more that we can invest in the homes and services so our older Australians can stay in their homes, the better for them, for the community and for the taxpayer. But this government is intent on nickel and diming this particular area.

In my particular region, we've gone through a very traumatic experience where previously we had three home-care modification companies servicing the Hunter region, but two of those companies have withdrawn from the market, leaving only one home-care modification company. And the government hasn't reallocated funding, so that one home-care modification company is now dealing with a huge waiting list for their services. There's been no additional funding and there's no ability to bring on more staff to deal with the fact that the two other companies have exited the market. Instead, there's just a longer waiting list for people to get ramps installed, shower rails installed—critical fall precautions that will keep people in their homes longer, that will save and avoid trauma to them, that will save taxpayers' money in the emergency department of hospitals and that will delay any move to residential aged care.

These are the important aspects of aged care that this government should be addressing. Instead we've got this timid and limited response to one recommendation of the aged care royal commission, demonstrating that this government does not give a fig for older Australians. They make big announcements at budget time about how many billions of dollars they're putting into aged care, how many home-care packages they're releasing, but in the end the proof is in the pudding and this government does not care about older Australians, does not fulfil that sacred contract that we have with every older Australian to give them a dignified retirement. That's why we really need to reform the aged-care system, but sadly this government is not up to that task.

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