Susan Templeman (Macquarie, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

There's nothing quite as sad as hearing aged-care nurses and carers these days talking about their love for the job that they do and then telling you why they just can't do it anymore. I can't count the number of aged-care workers who've told me that they just can't keep going—people like Sue, who told me she has been an aged-care nurse for 20 years. She has had the honour of nursing the parents of many friends in our local area but has walked away from it. She has described it as 'too shameful to continue doing the job'. So I'm very pleased to speak to this motion moved by the member for Corangamite.

Nurses and carers are walking away because they know they simply can't meet their own standards of care and that the load is just too great. Another worker tells me how hard it is to communicate with residents with the masks, the face shields, the full PPE, and says some of the nicest moments with residents are when she can link families via Zoom and FaceTime. She says 'watching their faces light up with happiness, just being able to see each other', is a real highlight for her, as is delivering parcels that families have dropped at the front door, the closest that families can get to their loved one.

I think that care workers see that, as hard as it is for them, it's really hard on residents and their families. Tony, another aged-care worker, tells me that he loved working in aged care, but, he says, 'The government has stripped me of my love for aged care, and I will not work in it again.' It is a real loss to the sector that, throughout this pandemic, incredible carers and nurses have walked away because they just don't feel supported by this government. There haven't been the resources put in to make their job bearable. Families are seeing that.

Marie has described to me how her uncle has been locked in his room since the week before Christmas. The week that she wrote this to me, she said that he was 'now allowed to have a visitor, but the visitor had to bring their own rapid antigen test and do it on site'. Of course, in the past few weeks, that has been a really difficult thing to find, let alone for people to be able to afford. For Karen, the decline in her mum from the ongoing lockdown is really apparent to her. Her mum suffers dementia. Karen says that when she's able to get out she is stimulated and operates at a much better level. But that obviously hasn't been happening.

These are the stories that show how critical the situation is in aged care. I think the Morrison government has been betting on out of sight, out of mind when it comes to aged care, that only a relatively small number of people are in residential aged care or work there or visit, and that people just won't notice. Well, we've all noticed. It isn't good enough that aged care is being really left on its own to struggle through some extremely difficult times. I think the government is betting on the fact that these are the people who will be silenced either by age, by exhaustion or by respect, because the families of residents really respect what the workers are doing and they don't want to make life more difficult for them.

The royal commission, which cost more than $100 million, told us this before COVID, before the pandemic. The report, which was the size of a box of wine, showed us that it isn't good enough and there is neglect in these facilities. That was before COVID. I wish that that had been enough to distract the Prime Minister from his photo-ops and the Minister for Senior Australians and Aged Care Services from going to the cricket. Clearly it wasn't enough. The pandemic continues to be not enough to get their attention—the attention that aged-care residents deserve.

It has to be bad, doesn't it, when the government calls in the troops? It is bad beyond what any of us not living or working in those facilities can perceive. I don't speak from my own perspective in recent times. I haven't been inside an aged-care facility since Boxing Day because of the ongoing lockdowns that occur. It opens for a day and then an outbreak slams it shut. My mum, like many others, has to look at an email at 11 o'clock tonight to see if she's allowed to go and feed my father the next day. This is what so many families are going through. We cannot in this place think that that is good enough.

I also want to challenge the concept that the people who live in aged care are palliative. They're not. They are living and they deserve a richness to their life. It is our job in parliament and as a government to make that happen.

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